“Days of Giving” Initiative (Photo)

About 20 volunteers from The JBG Companies spent two days recently working to rebuild a house near the Wheaton Metro station that is planned for a single mother and her child in need of an affordable home. The JBG teams worked with Habitat for Humanity of Montgomery County as part of the company’s annual Days of Giving initiative in which employees receive paid time off to volunteer.

Habitat purchased the home on Georgia Avenue as a distressed property several months ago. The exterior and foundation were good, but the inside needed to be gutted, according to Amanda Stein, Habitat’s manager of resource development. Habitat uses volunteer labor to reduce costs. When completed, the home will be sold to the single mom using a Habitat-funded mortgage.

Volunteering to give back to a community is always a great thing. But it feels especially good for us to be able to help someone get a decent home that they can afford. Habitat for Humanity does a terrific job at supporting the entire process of home ownership for those in need, and we are very happy to play even a small part in their work,” said Matthew Blocher, a senior vice president of JBG.

“The JBG volunteers were great,” Stein said. “They were very skilled in that they were able to do some pretty technical stuff for us.” In addition to other tasks, volunteers did some major work on the house’s HVAC system. “Because they could do that for us, we were able to save quite a bit of money. Otherwise we would have had to hire someone to do that work,” she said.

Habitat for Humanity provides homes to screened applicants who make 30 percent to 60 percent of an area’s median income. In addition to the HVAC work, other work completed by the JBG volunteers included hanging and sanding drywall, wrapping water lines beneath the house, and digging landscape beds. JBG also provided a monetary contribution to help complete work on the home, which should be ready for its new owner in July.

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