Summer Work Camps

One of the ways the church supports our immediate neighborhood is by helping to maintain and rehabilitate local housing. At one point church members walked through our neighborhood and recorded some 175 abandoned homes that blighted the area, reduced home prices and made our neighborhood unsafe. Bad things happen in abandoned houses.

So we made improving housing one of the points of our church mission statement.

We helped establish a local group to buy and renovate houses and sell them at affordable prices to low income persons. This effort was merged into Rock Island Economic Growth some years ago.

Another effort has been to bring in youth groups from churches around the Midwest - Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin - to do work camps to assist in bring houses up to par.

Our current partner is Project NOW. They have a number of rental units that need to be cleaned up between tenants. By doing this with volunteer labor we can help keep the costs lower to Project NOW and to the tenants.


The groups stay in our parish house and have a good summer experience. Work Camp groups stay from three to six days and work on houses and apartment units under the supervision of Project NOW staff. We have a summer camps coordinator who makes local arrangements and is the host for each work camp groups. The coordinator greets the group, shops for food for the campers to prepare, and helps arrange evening programs - either educational or recreational.

The work camps coordinator for summer 2008 was Erin Lambert, a recent graduate of University of Iowa. Seven church groups participated in work camps this summer.