by Pamela Steinbach

Helping Habitat for Humanity Rise to Another Level

Step into Dr. Regina Leffers’ office at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), and the first thing you’ll notice is a big, beautiful, colorful painting. It’s a representation of all that interests Dr. Leffers and how those interests flow into one another, feed one another and, in turn, nourish her creativity. Dr. Leffers, you see, is the artist who created the painting.

By profession, she’s IPFW’s director of the Center for the Built Environment and associate professor of Construction. Her passion is for environmental sustainability … for Northeast Indiana Green Build Coalition (NEIGBC), an organization she established in 1995 … and for helping solve various social problems. This, along with her obvious artistic sensibility, makes her an ideal choice to direct a new building and documentary project for Habitat for Humanity.

Perhaps a bit of background is in order before we describe what the project entails.

For many years, now, Habitat for Humanity, which normally builds conventional stick-built homes, has attempted to construct advanced, fully sustainable, energy-efficient homes throughout the United States. This has necessitated training staff and volunteers every time, in every new location. What’s taught is how to plan and build in innovative ways. Trainees complete the coursework, complete a home, then move on to another project, educating a new group of volunteers. To date, however, it’s been difficult to keep track of the knowledge gained from site to site and to ensure not only consistency in instruction but also consistency in the quality of construction. It would take a full-time, nationally coordinated staff to achieve that from project to project. Enter Dr. Leffers.

Her idea was to document the construction of a sustainable home in Fort Wayne and make that documentary available in a DVD presentation that Habitat for Humanity could use to train people across the country. That way, building truly sustainable homes anywhere would be more feasible, even though staff and volunteers would change within communities or from one community to another.

“With this DVD,” says Dr. Leffers, “we’ll help change Habitat for Humanity from being a builder of regular stick-built homes to being a builder of sustainable, energy-efficient residences. Creating the DVD is the most exciting part of this project, because it’ll make the biggest bang for the buck.”

Dr. Leffers envisions the DVD as having a broader impact as well. Since humanity in general expends so much of its energy building homes, teaching people how to build a more-sustainable home has definite merit. The DVD can be used to raise awareness in all homeowners about the value of building to save energy. As Dr. Leffers tells it, “We’ll teach them how to think about a piece of property, how to get sunshine passively collected, how to use shade to make sure it’s cool in summer and how to use natural, free materials. In short, people will learn to think ‘sustainability.’”

Given Dr. Leffers’ varied interests, her creativity and her experience, she’ll no doubt succeed in realizing this goal — with Habitat for Humanity and beyond.