“I came here because I see people like the Plumleys as my neighbors in need. I plan to build one bridge at a time here.” Peter Thiessen, MDS project director in West Virginia
WEST VIRGINIA FLOODS
Spring 2015 — After severe flooding, many people in southwest West Virginia lost their “driveway bridges,” or their only access to the highway from their homes. Designing and building a bridge was new territory for MDS. It required innovative thinking and unique collaborations to bring to fruition. To date, MDS has built more than 100 driveway bridges. Constructed from concrete, steel, and oak planks, the bridges are a signature combination of MDS priorities: helping those most in need to better cope with the next disaster.
West Virginia
MDS has taken mitigation to a new level, helping to build entire subdivisions on higher land for homeowners who lost everything to flooding.
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Spanning new territory In the last decade, some 50,000 volunteers have served close to a half million days to help disaster survivors in the U.S. and Canada. While there is no question that MDS projects will change in the face of COVID-19, there is also no doubt that MDS will continue to bring hope to those in need.
“MDS is the light at the end of the tunnel. I am really thankful that they came.” Maretta Champagne, Oglala Lakota member and local recovery leader in Pine Ridge, South Dakota
Hope Village
In West Virginia, more than 1,800 MDS volunteers helped finish 28 homes in “Hope Village,” in the wake of the 2015 floods. Four years later, in Coastal Bend, Texas, a new 40-home subdivision, Hope Meadows, brought a sense of hope and belonging to survivors of Hurricane Harvey.
Alberta
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE
As MDS slowly and carefully reopens projects with new COVID-19 safely rules in place, volunteers are showing resilience with the way their lives of service have changed. In Minneapolis, where peaceful protests and damaging disturbances took place in June around racial injustice, MDS Minnesota Unit Chair Glenn Geissinger coordinated volunteers to help clean up and restore minority-owned businesses. He reflected, “I think it’s a very different type of opportunity and one that resonates well with MDS.” In Willow, Alaska, volunteers are already hard at work building five new homes for survivors of a wildfire in 2019. They’re racing against the harsh winter, explained Steve Wiest, a regional operations coordinator for MDS. “The window of
DETROIT FLOODS
August 11, 2014 — Heavy rains in Detroit, Michigan, caused more than 10 billion gallons of sewage- contaminated water to flood into people’s basements, damaging some 200,000 homes. “Even before the flood there were a lot of people struggling. So the flood just made that more difficult,” explained Rev. Becky Wilson, coordinator of the local recovery group. “There’s a lot of need here but also a lot of gifts, things you can learn from the wonderful people here.” In a two-and-a-half year response, MDS volunteers came to know and assist more than 400 homeowners in Detroit.
RECONCILIATION AND RESTORATION
July 2019 — “It’s not a typical MDS disaster response,” said Nick Hamm, MDS Ontario unit chair. “But residential schools were a disaster for Canada’s Indigenous people.” Sixty-one participants of the MDS summer youth program were invited to Brantford, Ontario, to help restore Woodland Cultural Centre for the Six Nations community and learn more about becoming reconciled with Indigenous people in Canada. The building, formerly a residential school where thousands of Indigenous children were stripped of their language and culture, had been damaged by a storm. “It’s personal, there
opportunity is small and winter is coming,” he said. “By mid-September the temperature drops and the snow could begin to fall. If we are going to act, the time is now.”
are names and faces. It’s not just textbook information now,” said Timothy Khoo, 16, describing what it was like to meet residential school survivors while volunteering with MDS.
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Alaska
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