Delores Powell sat awake at 3 a.m. in her hotel in Disney World. Back home, more than 6,000 community members were working day and night to rebuild her dream home and transform her entire community.
However, Powell's thoughts were focused elsewhere.
Instead of worrying about her home at 228 Massachusetts Ave., Powell was concerned with the family whose renovation was put on hiatus, and that local contracting company David Homes was leaving the business of a paying customer on hold.
"The contractor that [was] building my house has a business and he must have had work going on when they contacted him [to work on my house]," Powell said. "He's doing this for free. That's losing money for him and for his employees. [I realized] this is all love and I'm really grateful for everything that has happened."
Powell, who raised by her mother in Jamaica, has always considered herself a butterfly trapped in a cocoon. Even after a change of luck, Powell's altruistic personality left her concerned with how her fortune affected the lives of others.
ABC-TV's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition arrived in Buffalo last November with high hopes of helping Powell and her family re-build their demolition-worthy home into an energy-efficient dream.
The reconstruction of Powell's residence sparked cast members to incorporate other neighborhood homes and empty corners into a transformation of Buffalo's West Side. Close to one year later, the week of hard work has become a catalyst for current and future energy-efficient and beautification projects in the neighborhood.
Over 6,300 Buffalo community members put in 53,544 hours of dedicated hard work, breaking the show's record for volunteers. Program executives turned the one-hour episode into a two-hour special to display how community power can transform an entire neighborhood.
Western New York's branch of the national organization Americorps teamed up with People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), David Homes, Buffalo-ReUse and ReTree WNY to help organize the flood of volunteers. Patrick Metzger, director of integrated communications at WNY Americorps, was among the staff to manage the volunteers.
"We needed to make sure people were in the right places with the right skills," Metzger said. "During that week, people showed up en masse. The week was just top-notch insane. There were thousands of people serving hundreds each day. We relied on our members and staff to pull it together, along with other organizations. Our guys clocked in over 100 hours that week, and, with the support of the organizations, we really made it happen."
The "extreme zone," a block of Massachusetts Avenue deep in Buffalo's West Side, became the site of Extreme Makeover: Neighborhood Edition. Volunteers and local organizations affected 71 homes by fixing houses, landscaping properties, building community gardens, and planting trees, among other projects.
In November 2007, Powell applied to the ABC-TV program and waited until February 2008 to learn that her application was filed. Powell, however, struggled to maintain hope that she would be chosen for the popular show. During the long application process, Powell thought about what she had gone through and considered the struggles of the West Side.
"I started thinking about my neighbors and thinking that if Extreme Makeover comes, and if they make changes in my house, I would want them to do something in the neighborhood," Powell said.
Over a year and a half later, Powell and her family were chosen for the show. The excitement didn't stop there.
After seven days of demolition, the Powell family arrived home in a stretch limo and thought the executive producers had made them wait on the wrong street. Just before moving the bus that blocked the visibility of her home, Powell realized that her entire block had been transformed.
Project crews created a community garden on Massachusetts Avenue, which was one of the first projects to show the effect that Powell's experience had on the West Side. The garden, which was constructed on the site of a former building that burned down, contained a simple plaque remembering a neighborhood resident that had been shot.
"The memory of what it was before and what it is now [makes] you realize the changes they brought to the neighborhood," Powell said. "It seems as if [the garden had been] there forever. It was like something not made with hands, it was really beautiful."
The project affected the community at large but also created the home that Powell had dreamed of for years. After moving to Buffalo from Manhattan in 2002, Powell purchased a six-bedroom house for a mere $12,000. The seller failed to disclose that the house was on the city's demolition list. For years, Powell and her oldest son Joel tried to make the house a home.
Local community leaders who have known Powell for years noticed her leadership and dedication upon meeting her.
"We knocked on [Powell's] door a few years ago, and when we told her about the work that PUSH hoped to do when it was still a small group, she brought us right into her house," said Eric Walker, director of organizing for PUSH. "[Powell] toured us around her home to show us the work that she and Joel had done. The point-by-point touring let us know that she was a self motivator, she wasn't going to wait for the opportunity to fall out of her lap. She was a real working person who was struggling with things that Western New York struggles with."
Powell became a board member of PUSH and has been a leader at every level of the organization. From cooking food at summertime cookouts, to hosting people in her home, to organizing PUSH circles, Powell has helped the West Side community and its members in many ways.
The Extreme Makeover: Home Edition project even went beyond national borders.
When Powell received her first paycheck as a home health aide in Manhattan over 22 years ago, she sent half of the money she had to provide shoes for her family in Jamaica. During the makeover project, Soles4Souls assisted Powell in sending hundreds of shoes to Powell's grade school in Jamaica.
Powell remembered the effect that walking shoeless had on her self-esteem as a child and realized how the donation affected hundreds of little girls.
"We grew up with a love inside of us," Powell said. "I remember being a teenage girl, but boys were never interested in us because we were always shabby. A teenager walking barefoot wasn't something very pleasant."
Nearly one year later
Powell's home has become a catalyst for beautification projects and the creation of more energy efficient homes on Buffalo's West Side.
The house at 228 Massachusetts Ave. has become a sanctuary for Powell. Her bedroom is adorned with butterflies to represent her personal transformation from a caterpillar trapped in a cocoon to a gleaming butterfly. However, the house has become more than aesthetically pleasing.
Constructed by David Homes along with the help of volunteers and organizations, Powell's house is the first in New York State to become certified as an Emerald Level Green Home by the NAHB Research Center. The home has become a medium for the development of similar energy-efficient projects in Buffalo's West Side.
Powell's home is regulated by The Energy Detective (TED), a real-time in-home electricity management system that keeps track of the amount of electricity, gas and water used and projects the exact dollar amount for the month. According to Powell, TED has helped her maintain her home.
"The cost of our gas has gone down from $1080 a month in the winter…the most I've paid since the makeover is $250 a month," Powell said.
According to Walker, whose organization helped Powell during the application process, PUSH has worked with the City of Buffalo to level off any incremental assessment increases on Powell's home.
"We just want to make sure the house maintains its affordability as a jewel of the neighborhood," Walker said. "We are also working on a net-zero house that we hope will also be a beacon of what energy efficiency looks like."
The transformation of Powell's home has served as a starting point for other projects in the area.
According to Walker, PUSH hopes to develop 20 more units of energy efficient affordable housing on the West Side. The organization plans to also implement a statewide program, Green Jobs Green New York, with the NYS Energy Research and Development Authority. PUSH is bringing media attention to National Fuel's improvement of its conservation incentive program to meet the development of low-income pairs and invest in job training and employment through that program.
"The [Extreme Makeover] project really put the spotlight on our development work that we have been doing," Walker said. "In the year before, we were actively acquiring [empty] lots across the neighborhood unbeknownst to the whole neighborhood. Now, people see us in the streets doing vacant lot management and they know us. We're branding the reclamation of the neighborhood as a PUSH project."
The Extreme Makeover project has brought PUSH more volunteers and more members, and has helped the organization become more visible by solving community issues in the neighborhood.
"Going green isn't just a lifestyle, it's about survival," Walker said. "That's really what guides our thinking about how we bring neighborhood and community led economic development to places where people can see it."
PUSH strives to solve the "big-ticket" problems in the neighborhood.
"How do we make sure that community members have access to healthy food?" Walker asked. "How do we make sure that they're not exposed to indoor or outdoor contamination, and how do we think, as a community, to reuse vacant spaces in a neighborhood? Our green jobs effort is meant to do that by employing people in our neighborhood."
Powell has helped with various PUSH and WNY Americorps energy-efficient projects in the past year. The Extreme Makeover project has affected a city, a neighborhood and a very grateful family.
"The entire change has given me new hope," Powell said. "It put new meaning to my life and made me feel that all things are possible…All the things I've ever been through in my life – the disappointment, the broken dreams – all of that has been mended."
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
