With Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits blaring in the background, half a dozen students gathered Saturday on Massachusetts Row to build a picnic table and structural trusses. Construction at Dartmouth is nothing new, but what made this scene unusual was that the man skillfully lopping off the corner of a two-by-four with a circular saw had never before used a power tool.
Saturday's on-campus construction was part of an effort to publicize Dartmouth Habitat for Humanity's work at a site near Lebanon, N.H. The student-led organization relies on volunteer amateur construction workers every Wednesday and Saturday to help cobble together a house, which they will then sell to a local family that currently lives in inadequate housing.
For student volunteers the work is a chance to help the community while learning construction skills.
"Because we live in the Dartmouth bubble, many of us don't realize that there is a great need for affordable housing in the Upper Valley," Dartmouth Habitat Summer Co-Chair Wes Clark '08 said.
Habitat's unskilled laborers approach the formidable task of constructing a building with the help of Upper Valley Habitat's Executive Director Don Derrick and other more experienced volunteers.
"This morning we had a demo on saws, safety and cutting angles," Derrick said. "It's not amazingly difficult because there is a set formula and you just have to follow blueprints."
The Dartmouth group raised $100,000 for construction over the past year from various grants, alumni donations and programs like Bike and Build, a Habitat program through which students raised money biking across the country.
Clark said that they expect to finish most of the construction in the fall and then sell the house in the spring.
The Lebanon house will be the third that the Dartmouth chapter of Habitat has fully sponsored, and the organization has plans to continue funding and building a house every two years. In addition to their work with the Dartmouth projects, the Upper Valley chapter of Habitat tries to build another three houses every two years, according to Derrick.
Habitat selected the family of Richard Sherman, Angela Butterfield and their two children Daniel and Nicole as recipients of the Dartmouth house.
The family was chosen out of an applicant pool of approximately 60 who applied to buy the home, and has pledged to perform 500 hours of "sweat equity" in the construction of their house, which they will purchase from Habitat for approximately $100,000 on a 20-year no-interest mortgage.
Former Senator John Edwards encouraged groups like Habitat to continue confronting the lack of affordable housing in the Upper Valley when he came to campus in October 2005. Both Clark and Derrick said, however, that their current project has received no input from Edwards' Project Opportunity program.
Clark said that the summer is typically a good time for Habitat to pick up volunteers, especially when Greek houses and other groups sign up to help for a day. By project's end, about 200 volunteers will have worked on site, Clark estimated.
One of those volunteers, Chris Noel '08, put in his first day as a volunteer Saturday and said that he planned to come back to do more work.
"I've messed around with this kind of stuff before, but I've never had a chance to build something with a real plan," he said.
