ELGIN — They have built a house. They’ve put up walls. They’ve installed electricity, windows and plumbing. They’ve removed and replaced subflooring, and they have hung cabinetry.
They’ve logged more than 3,000 hours on home improvement projects around the Elgin area since they began their efforts four years ago.
And one Saturday morning earlier this month, the Workforce team from Elgin’s First Baptist Church moved furniture from one bedroom to another.
“This is something simple, but something they couldn’t do on their own,” said team member Dave Towner of Carpentersville.
The mission of Workforce is “to serve Christ by providing free home improvement labor to those in need,” according to David Pohlmeier of Elgin, one of the leaders of the ministry.
The team does that twice a month, sending teams of volunteers to complete home improvement jobs across the Fox Valley. Those jobs can be as simple as painting or raking leaves, or they can be as skilled as plumbing or roofing.
In just the past two years, the team of about 35 men has completed jobs at more than 50 homes — charging homeowners only for the materials to do the work, according to Pohlmeier. First Baptist sometimes can help cover the cost of materials, and Workforce provides the labor and the tools.
The ministry leader said the church does this simply because it’s a way “to go out and share God’s love by the work we do for people.”
And because it has people who can, he added.
Advice to volunteering
When one of the men in the church helped build a home in St. Charles several years ago, Pohlmeier said, “We started talking with a bunch of guys at church, and realized we had a bunch of skilled tradesmen in our church who could do a lot of good for the community.”
And “If you can swing a hammer, you can be part of Workforce,” he said.
In addition to the licensed plumbers and electricians on the team, several volunteers otherwise spend their weeks sitting behind a computer, according to Pohlmeier. And another 20-plus women at First Baptist have volunteered to make lunch for the team on Saturdays, he said.
Word about the team spread at church — and even at Home Depot, where strangers approached Workforce members asking for home improvement advice and they offered to do the work, according to Pohlmeier.
One man approached the ministry last year to ask if its members could help him paint the roof of his mobile home — a relatively small task, the ministry leader said. Several weeks later, the man contacted Workforce again because he’d been evicted from the home, which had been condemned by the city of Elgin.
Fifteen men volunteered more than 300 hours — every Saturday for eight straight weeks — and $1,200 to bring the home up to the minimum living standards so the man could return. They cleaned, removed garbage, replaced furniture, painted, removed and replaced the subfloor, and tiled several rooms, Pohlmeier said.
In 2009, a woman contacted Workforce after a note, some money and a brochure for the ministry were left on her door. Her house had been vandalized and bricks thrown through her windows, according to Pohlmeier.
The ministry didn’t just replace the broken windows. Members also spent 150 hours installing a sink, doing plumbing work and realigning the doors in her house. Herb’s Glass and Mirror in Elgin donated the windows for the job, and First Baptist also helped her organize her finances and set a budget.
In 2008, 12 volunteers from the ministry spent 200 hours and $500 tiling, grouting, cleaning, plumbing, painting, refinishing and hanging cabinetry to make an Elgin apartment livable for a refugee family from Myanmar that the church had sponsored.
Rewarding work
On a recent Saturday, seven men wearing navy blue T-shirts emblazoned with the white Workforce logo worked five different jobs around the Elgin area. It was a typical turnout for the volunteers, according to Pohlmeier.
They had worked before at Tracy Harrelson’s mobile home in Elgin. Harrelson is disabled and lives with her caregiver and a menagerie of pets in the two-bedroom home.
Inside her home, Towner and fellow volunteer Greg Dusek of Hampshire navigated through a maze of bedroom furniture, a large wire rabbit hutch and several dog crates temporarily transferred to the combination kitchen and living room. The two worked to switch out the furniture in the bedrooms.
Outside, John Birkholz’s shirt was smudged with fresh caulk, the result of the Elgin man’s first project of the day — caulking one of Harrelson’s bay windows.
Birkholz has been the team’s administrator for the past year and has created the documentation to streamline its efforts as requests for help have increased. His minivan, parked outside Harrelson’s home, was filled not only with ladders, tools and equipment, but also with detailed log books for each Workforce project,
Harrelson said she likes having the Workforce team help, and the team agreed.
“I just like helping people and seeing how they genuinely appreciate what we do,” Birkholz said.
And Towner said doing the work is “very rewarding — just seeing the smile on people’s faces when you’re finished.”
Correspondent Rita Hoover contributed to this report.