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Christmas in April: Your Home for You
| Article
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19915 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
2,368 Words |
| Author
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Brian Mitchell
Brian Mitchell writes and lives in Alexandria, Virginia. |
When the YMCA in Midland, Texas, asked for help in cleaning up a nearby vacant lot, Bobby Trimble offered to go the extra mile and fix up a few old houses in the neighborhood, houses whose owners were poor and elderly. Trimble's suggestion touched a friendly nerve in the community, so that on the appointed Saturday in October 1973 more than one hundred volunteers from local churches and civic groups tackled seventeen homes for a daylong blitz of cleaning and repair.
The volunteers accomplished so much and had so much fun that they decided they would do it again the following April. This time around, one of the homeowners was so pleased she declared: "It was just like Christmas."
"Christmas in April" has become an annual event in Midland. It may also have become the nation's fastest-growing charity, with new programs springing up every year in cities as far apart as Boston and Pasadena. This year seventy-eight communities will set aside one day a year to give thousands of poor, disabled, or elderly homeowners a better place to live--right in their own homes.
"Every city, regardless of what size, could use a program," says Trimble a veteran oil and gas scout, now revered as the godfather of Christmas in April programs across the nation. Born and raised in Goree, Texas, Trimble moved to Midland in 1953. Before 1973, he and other members of the Alamo Heights Baptist Church had already honed their home-repair skills by helping fix up the homes of widows in their church. They started with little tasks like stopping leaks and worked up to major repairs like replacing roofs. The church had also reached out to a nearby Mexican farming village on the Rio Grande. Members built a church, a parsonage, a schoolteacher's house, and a pipeline providing the village with fresh water.
For nearly tow decades, Trimble has overseen the Midland chapter of Christmas in April while helping to spread its community self-help message across the nation. "If more and more communities would try to help their own, we could phase out a lot of these federal programs, which are very high-cost boondoggles," he says.
For the past three years, Trimble has managed Midland's federal block grant fund for community development. "You can't spend the money like you'd like to spend it," he explains. "You've got to spend it like the federal government says you've got to spend it, and you have to hire out a lot of it." According to Trimble, Midland spent
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