Small Change

I'm sorry for the brief hiatus in blog entries. Many of you know I was in Costa Rica for about ten days and I am just now catching up.

However, while I was away our club accomplished a wonderful thing of which we all should be extremely proud. I'm referring to the Community Build, our new project of helping to rebuild and renovated a home on West Hill for a low or moderate-income family.

Over the period of one week in early September, twenty-four members and one guest used their hands--and probably some skills they didn't even know they had--to change the world.

That probably sounds a bit grandiose to you--a bit of an exaggeration, to say the least. But I don't think so.

Why? First of all, because there is no question that this project to rebuild one little house, on one little street, in one little neighborhood, in one little town...will create an opportunity for one family in all the vastness of humanity to live a better life. "Small change", you may say.

Not so. My mother always told me a penny--a one-cent piece--was a lot of money. (It was definitely worth a lot more in those days!) Her point was--and this is still true today--if something costs a dollar and you only have 99 cents, that one cent is now crucial.

And so it is with our club's work. Helping to renovate one house may not seem like much in the grand scheme, but by not doing so that one family's opportunities will diminish. Maybe the children will not grow up in a stable household, in a stable neighborhood with a good school system.

So that small "change", if you will, is not only crucial. It is making all the Community Builders quite a bit richer in seeing the immediate results of their labors. How, and to what extent our world will be enriched cannot be estimated or foreseen.


The Community Build is an ongoing effort of our club in partnership with Community Building Works and the Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services. Sign up sheets will be circulating at our meetings for the next work opportunity in early October.