save the date: Home Dedication

On December 12th at 11AM, please join us to dedicate the Luo/Lin family's new home at the Edes. Whether you've been out swinging a hammer or supported the Thrivent Builds house financially or just want to see a family fulfilling a dream, it's a ceremony not to be missed. Please RSVP on the Habitat site here if you plan to attend.

The family is finishing up their 500 'sweat equity' hours as volunteers work to finish their home for the dedication. Here's a bit about the family from Habitat:

Xi Yong and Yu Ling moved to the United States from China in 2001 to seek better opportunities and their two children, Yan Jun and Hong Ji, have taken advantage of that goal. Yan Jun has studied English and other subjects at the Peralta community colleges and recently transferred to Cal State Hayward, where she is in an accounting program. Her younger brother, Hong Ji, is a junior at Alameda High School, and volunteers to help the less fortunate over summer breaks with the Salvation Army.

The Luo family is invested in a stable and happy future for their whole family, and see education as the best way to achieve this. They moved to Alameda so that their children could benefit from the excellent schools there. Although they live in a nice neighborhood, their landlord forced them to move from an upstairs unit to a downstairs unit that is almost always dark and cold. There is no heat and the windows don’t properly close, so they are constantly catching colds and other illnesses. Although they pay a lot for their apartment, it is in a garage with poor air quality, and the low ceilings leak. Furthermore, because they don’t have a legal contract with their landlord, they worry they could be forced to leave at any time.
The family is thrilled to move into a Habitat development where they’ll have the security of owning their own home. "Edes Avenue is a nice, environmentally-friendly and peaceful neighborhood, where we can finally stop worrying about being forced to leave our home," Xi Yong says. Yan Jun hopes to become a certified public accountant so that she can help make the mortgage payments and her parents won’t have to work so hard. The Luo family is looking forward to building relationships with their neighbors through sweat equity. "We appreciate our neighbors’ work on our house and we will work our best on 'sweat equity' in order to help." They are also excited to put down roots in their new community. "Our dream for the future is to have a group of neighbors that are friends, who support one another," Yan Jun says.