Extreme Makeover - Hope House Style

The house in question is not your run of the mill single-family structure. Rather, it is a house that provides for the daytime needs of homeless men and women who live on the streets in this community. These needs include showers, mail delivery, access to voice mail, food, respite from the heat and cold and assistance with job hunting and other services needed for personal extreme makeovers.

The structure is in one of the oldest sections of Shreveport and is on the National Historic Register; however, it had been vacant for some time prior to opening as the day shelter in October 2004. Years of neglect to the exterior resulted in peeling paint and rotten wood, which led to the idea of pulling together an effort to establish our own extreme makeover team.

The project got a jump-start with a $500 donation in late October 2004. The day shelter coordinator and her executive director began the legwork to pull it all together. A suggestion to team up with the City of Shreveport's yearly Paint Your Heart Out Shreveport program provided an opportunity to expand that project from just helping low-income elderly and disabled homeowners to helping nonprofits as well. Paint Your Heart Out Shreveport helps approximately 100 families each spring by scraping and painting the exterior of their homes. Donations of paint and materials that remained from that project eased the way for the project to materialize.

The City of Shreveport contacted their best group of volunteers from Barksdale Air Force Base to organize the workload. Maurice Anderson led this crew, showing up with forty airmen at 8 a.m. and immediately demonstrating the organizational skills the military instills so well. Day shelter residents and community advocates rounded out the workers. Those with few scraping and painting skills set about cleaning the yard or preparing the hamburgers and hotdogs that all the workers enjoyed.

By 6:30 p.m. the job was done. The before and after pictures rival those proudly displayed each week on the popular television show. And the homeless individuals that spend many hours working on their own extreme makeovers at Hope House are awfully grateful for the building's new face. They saw a team determined to make this structure into a sound investment for the future. They learned that the effort they put forth in their own lives each day at this place can lead them down the same successful path.