Rebuilding Together Minnesota

Safe at Home: We provide home safety and fall prevention modifications and ramps for older adults or those living with a disability so that they can continue to live in safety and independence in their own homes. A project may include volunteer-delivered tasks, such as installing grab bars, wheelchair-accessible ramp or elongated stairs, handrails, handheld shower units, shower seats, and no-slip bath treads, and contractor-delivered environmental home modifications, such as doorway widening and kitchen or bathroom renovations, to enable aging-in-place and single-level living. We also provide Safe at Home kits, which include a smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector, no-slip bath treads, dawn to dusk lightbulbs and nightlights, grabbers, mini-flash light, batteries, kitchen fire extinguisher, reusable masks, sanitizing wipes, and an application for Safe at Home services.

Community Revitalization: We stabilize and revitalize neighborhoods by providing safe and welcoming spaces for communities to gather, such as community centers, schools, supportive housing facilities and outdoor community spaces.

Home Repair: We provide volunteer-delivered repairs including weatherizing, installing flooring, patching, painting, siding, and landscaping, and timely contractor-delivered repair or replacement of essential systems, such as HVAC, electrical, plumbing, outer envelope and roofs that are critical to healthy, livable homes.

Construction Workforce Training Collaborative: We are working with various partners to deliver innovative public-private partnerships that provide entry-level training while increasing our capacity to serve low-income homeowners. During the summer of 2022, we partnered with St. Catherine University's Occupational Therapy program to provide hands-on, field experience for Occupational Therapy students. This experience also provided valuable home assessments for all of our Safe at Home clients. We plan to expand this partnership in 2023. In 2023, we will also be working with Vuyo Community Partners to design a construction training program tailored towards area youth ages 17-24.Rebuilding Together Minnesota preserved affordable homeownership and addressed health and safety hazards at 285 homes, directly impacting the well-being of 392 residents. Clients served live in Ada, Andover, Anoka, Blaine, Bloomington, Brewster, Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, Cambridge, Champlin, Columbia Heights, Cottage Grove, Crystal, Eagan, Eden Prairie, Edina, Hastings, Heron Lake, Hopkins, Inver Grove Heights, Jackson, Jeffers, Jordan, Kettle River, Lakefield, Leota, Little Canada, Maple Grove, Maplewood, Mendota, Minneapolis, Mounds View, Mountain Lake, New Brighton, North Oaks, North Saint Paul, Oakdale, Pipestone, Richfield, Robbinsdale, Rochester, Roseville, Round Lake, Saint Louis Park, Saint Paul, Saint Paul Park, Shoreview, Spring Lake Park, Vadnais Heights, Westbrook, White Bear Lake, Windom, Woodbury, and Worthington. In addition, we completed six Community Revitalization projects, impacting the 626 clients served through those nonprofit facilities and community spaces. Projects utilized 573 volunteers contributing 4,033 hours of service to the community at a value of $130,386.89 worth of labor (based on the Independent Sector's 2021 value of volunteer labor in Minnesota of $32.33 per hour). We continue to implement a Healthy Housing Principles-based approach and incorporate the seven Principles of Healthy Homes into practice (Keep it: dry, clean, ventilated, pest-free, safe, contaminant-free, and maintained). Together with the National Center for Healthy Housing, the Rebuilding Together network has identified 25 Safe and Healthy Home Priorities that can be used to identify the safety and health-related issues at each home and also to measure the improvements related to health and safety resulting from our work.