Transitions in orange

Home Depot team helps fix up NCCAC transitional housing

MOSES LAKE — Over the last few days, Home Depot has been helping resident transitional housing make a transition of its own.

North Columbia Community Action Council executive director Ken Sterner explained that his organization has a shelter for people with absolutely no funding whatsoever.

"Then we have another step, which we call transitional housing," he said. "We actually consider it more akin to a homeless shelter than we do low-income housing, because people who are living here are people who can afford to pay so little for rent, it's even less than what you would normally expend for general low-income housing."

In the transitional housing, the NCCAC does a lot of in-depth work with the clients living there, Sterner said. Clients in residence are required to pay a "little pittance" for rent and work with a family development specialist to try and get stabilized.

"That's really the goal here — it isn't necessarily to make them self-sufficient at this stage, but to stabilize them in their life so that they are available to get job training, to find other jobs, get some education and so forth, and then transition into another level," Sterner said.

Funding is limited, meaning that the NCCAC depends on volunteers like Home Depot, Sterner said.

"We're just very appreciative," he said. "We don't have the newest buildings in the world, but we try to keep them up, clean and in as good repair as we can."

Sterner said that the housing units are usually full, although there are presently some vacancies. One of the conditions to living in the transitional housing is working with the NCCAC, he said.

Five to 10 Home Depot employees volunteered their time to help out with the project each day since it began Monday.

Project manager Ken Schnirring, supervisor of the hardware, tools and paint department for Home Depot said the project involved power washing the building to knock off most of the old paint, masking the building and then providing the base coat of paint and trim for the building. Old fascia board was also replaced. Schnirring estimated that the overall project will be done by today.

Team Depot gets resources from Home Depot's corporate offices once a quarter to help a place in the community.

"We chose this one for this quarter, and actually we might adopt this place and do it next quarter too," Home Depot store manager Ross Hardley said.

Hardley said that his business wants to be part of the community.

"This kind of fits the bill of what we like to help out with," Hardley said. "We like to help at-risk youth, we like to help affordable housing … If you look around here, you can see that (the transitional housing) needed a little bit of a face lift, and we were happy to do it."