This is not an informative email with a happy homeowner ending.
This is not an email that can be skimmed and quickly deleted.
This is an email written with a heavy heart. An email that requires help and hope.
Your Flood Recovery Office has been busy registering volunteer teams to assist in the Flood Recovery. Storms of 2008 in Iowa ranked as the TOP infrastructure disaster for Red Cross and 5th worst infrastructure disaster for FEMA. By all the formulas, our Cedar Rapids area is in a text book cycle of a 4 year recovery rebuild. With all the devastation around we are unable to secure enough homes for our volume of volunteers to rebuild.
Why?
Option 1: Being in the Midwest with our strong work ethic and community pride, we have successfully helped our neighbors. Those in our community who are connected in relationships have rebuilt.
Option 2: Jumpstart – a unique funding source to disaster – has truly helped place people back into their homes.
Option 3: Jumpstart focuses on contractor involvement in rebuilding. With the current funding available to home owners, there are restrictions in using volunteer labor. See Action Item D Below for more information.
Option 4: Our city has more landlords in that area than we believed. There are many limitations to helping landlords.
What have we done to solve the problem?
Completed: May 9th a Neighborhood Canvassing project was started to touch base with neighbors. 85 volunteers assisted and we have about 30 finishing today. From the initial 40 calls placed on Wednesday, we did not secure any LARGE projects for volunteers. We have projects for little teams and projects that will take about 3 weeks.
Completed: Advertised in the Rebuild Newsletter (mailed to 4,000 homeowners) to encourage those who need help rebuilding to call the Flood Office.
Completed: Communicated with the Community Recovery Center the need for projects back in January. Constantly reminding the main office of the LALTRC that volunteers are coming and we are short on work.
Completed: Through the work of Becky Wood, Iowa Conference Director of Recovery, securing additional cities (like Independence) to send and sleep volunteers.
Completed: Opened communication with the Habitat for Humanity, through Steve Smith of Kenwood, to slide some volunteers over towards their pre/post blitz work.
Completed: Found additional disaster sites needing volunteers in the Dakotas and Indiana.
Where your help is needed:
Action Item A: Communicate to your congregations that if they know anyone in the 500 year Flood Plain that needs help to contact our Flood Office.
Action Item B: If you know anyone in your communities that needs assistance with painting the exterior of their house, building ramps, deferred upkeep, or other projects to please contact us. Teams are willing to work on non-flooded homes.
Action Item C: CONTACT the non-profits your congregation has a relationship with. Explain we have many volunteers and would like to send some their way. Painting, sorting, fixing things, landscaping, sorting food/clothes, and more. Contact your Flood Recovery office with details.
Action Item D: Write our elected leadership regarding lifting the restrictions on Jumpstart. Jumpstart is a resource for funds many homeowners access for their rebuilding projects. The money left to be distributed is from federal funding. This funding relates to lead based paint and the Federal CDBG requirements tied along with that funding. Essentially, volunteers are not allowed to work in a federally funded project once the funding kicks in.
With the number of volunteers coming to Iowa, we have come to a real roadblock. If homeowners get the needed money for materials from Jumpstart, we are unable to work in their homes based on the rules. Any project between $5000 and $24,999 must comply with HUD’s lead safe housing rule, which requires a visual risk assessment to identify any lead hazards (such as chipping and peeling paint) and remediation (which may be simply paint stabilization) according to lead safe work practices. The rules and regulations are written by the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) writers and would be backed up by legislation.
If the homeowners don’t get the money for materials, we can work in their homes . . . . but then there is no money for materials.
We need to send our letters asking for the lead regulations to be lifted allowing volunteer labor to:
Dear Senator Grassley
150 First Ave NE
Suite 325
Cedar Rapids, IA 52401
Our goal is to provide teams with a meaningful Christian experience with plenty of work. Right now, we can’t do that the first week in June for the 250 volunteers. Sure, we could make up enough work for the first two weeks totally 500 volunteers. But we CAN NOT continue that for 10 weeks. This week we are actively selecting teams of volunteers to help Habitat and Independence. If we don’t get more homes without Jumpstart restrictions or find non-profits that need help, we will have to start calling teams (who haven’t purchased plane tickets or large teams that are harder to change) to divert them to Indiana or other VIM sites.
Many have asked what can I do for Flood Recovery, above is what you can do.
Once we start calling teams explaining the situation, it will be really, really hard to recruit new teams to come.
FEMA documentation explains that faith based organizations are the bookends to disasters. The first one on the scene and the last ones off. We need to keep a good status in the volunteer world to be able to recruit volunteers for the time when we need them again.
Please help,
Rev. Melisa Bracht-Wagner
Marion First United Methodist Church
Iowa Flood Recovery Volunteers in Mission Disaster Coordinator
An UMCOR Partner
(319) 480-4469 www.fumcmarion.org
