Spotlight: Home Repair Volunteer Jan
Jan has been a Core volunteer with Habitat’s Home Repair team for 5 years, and she’s proud to be the only female core volunteer. Learn more about Jan, the kind of work she does, and what it means to her.
Jan has been a Core volunteer with Habitat’s Home Repair team for 5 years, and she’s proud to be the only female core volunteer. Learn more about Jan, the kind of work she does, and what it means to her.
Janis Rose, who has a dry, acerbic wit that belies her good-natured friendliness, has been volunteering at the ReStore long enough that the start of her time with Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity is a distant memory.
“It’s been five… six years? Five years,” she recalls, “Actually, I was a full-time volunteer a long time ago, working on the trucks. That was eons ago, though.”
Since beginning her recent streak of volunteer service in 2019, Janis has become something of a fixture at the Asheville ReStore. In fact, she ranked #4 in top volunteer hours across the entire affiliate in 2023, dedicating 577 hours of her time to Habitat’s work. When congratulated on it, she gives a raised eyebrow and a cheeky, “yeehaw.”
Many of her hours in the ReStore, if not most, are spent handling holiday décor. Donations of seasonal decorations are a constant throughout the year, and with correspondingly seasonal demand, the accumulated goods can eventually grow out of control. When the flow of holiday items began to necessitate consistent oversight, Janis took on the challenge. On Mondays, while the store is closed to customers, she stocks the upper showroom’s holiday corner in preparation for upcoming celebrations. Sometimes she’s joined by her beloved beagle, Teak, who naps under the warm glow of the skylights while she works.
When there is no holiday to which she can tailor the shelves, she works with fellow volunteers to orchestrate the sorting and storing of goods in the basement. Though it may sound like a casual affair, the steady accumulation of holiday donations inevitably requires a labor-intensive mid-year purge of the surplus. If you have walked out of the Asheville ReStore with a $5 box of ornaments and decor during our annual “Christmas in July” sale, you can thank Janis for that.
Despite her consistency and dedication to the work, she says it’s not the Christmas decorations that keep her volunteering with the ReStore.
“The best part about volunteering at the ReStore is the people,” Janis shares, “The people, and doing incredibly good work for a great cause. Every day I’m grateful that I have a home, and I’m so grateful that we’re able to help provide that for others.”
When she’s not volunteering with the ReStore, Janis spends her time gardening and informally volunteering in her community, helping neighbors with personal projects and transportation.
“I do wear my Habitat hat and my shirt to show people that I’m proud that I work with an institution that provides good service,” she says, “and I feel like telling people, ‘go get it at [the ReStore] instead of paying, you know, $30 or $40 for something new.’”
Though speaking to John Harvin may not give you the impression of someone who craves the spotlight (even if he’s been featured in our Volunteer Spotlight before), he continues to distinguish himself in his volunteer service. Last year, John logged a total of 727 volunteer hours, more than any other volunteer with Asheville Habitat in 2023. He would likely be the first to point out that it’s no competition (every bit of volunteer help counts, after all), but even he was surprised by his yearly total.
“I only put in two or three hours a day,” he explains.
A humble protest from a man who volunteers Monday through Friday.
John has been volunteering with the Asheville Habitat ReStores since 2015, working his way through box after box of donated hardware and tools alongside his fellow volunteers. By now, he has probably processed enough hardware to fill the average Home Depot, but he still finds the fun in it.
“[It’s] just so much fun,” John shares, “you never know what’s going to come in. I especially enjoy getting old tools, cleaning them up and looking up what people have used or sold them for—things like that. It’s almost like archeology, digging into the past.”
Despite this, it’s not the excitement of the treasure hunt that brings him back every weekday morning. Like Janis, John finds himself drawn to Habitat by the importance of the work and the community that has formed around it.
“Number one, what a great organization, the work they do,” he says, “Number two, you get a chance to work with a lot of really fun people… Not only with the volunteers, but the employees, too. Such a great group of people. It’s fun to come in in the morning and have everyone know your name.”
While not as visible as swinging hammers on a jobsite or processing ReStore donations, Habitat’s office volunteers play an essential role in the organization. These dedicated folks handle behind-the-scenes work including volunteer data input, answering phones, printing materials, and more. Rhoda is an admin office core volunteer, helping in Homeowner Services.
Core volunteers (weekly or bi-weekly) are foundational to Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity. Their commitment to service has helped bring thousands of adults and children home since 1983. What keeps them coming back, week after week and year after year? Overwhelmingly, it is a commitment to Habitat’s mission, the camaraderie of fellow volunteers, a sense of purpose, and fulfilling, feel-good work.
With Earth Day just around the corner, it’s an ideal time to reflect on how the Asheville Habitat ReStores fit into not only our mission and community, but our responsibility to minimize our waste. Our ReStores play a crucial role in recirculating saleable goods within our community at affordable prices. Every item purchased at the ReStore—a gently used piece of furniture, a salvaged building material, or a pre-loved appliance—helps fund Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity’s Homeownership and Home Repair programs. This sustainable cycle not only supports families and individuals in need of safe, affordable housing, but also keeps material objects from the landfill while giving them a second chance at life. Read on to learn more about how we minimize our impact on the environment while maximizing our impact on our community.
In 2023, the Asheville and Weaverville ReStores diverted 2,851 tons of waste from the landfill. If you’re wondering what that looks like, that’s the mass of roughly 1,400 passenger cars — or more cars than can fit on the Golden Gate Bridge at once! Through a steady stream of cabinets, appliances, furniture, housewares and, yes, even cars, donors in our community kept a veritable San Francisco traffic jam worth of material flowing through the ReStores last year. Gently loved couches that might have been tossed at the transfer station were instead re-homed to people in need of seating on a budget. Volunteers repaired large appliances that had given up the ghost, breathing new life into sturdy old machines with new parts. And excess glassware donated by local restaurants found itself back in style, rather than back in the bin. Though the sheer volume of usable goods kept out of the ground can be hard to conceptualize, the results are not: in 2023, proceeds from the sales of these items helped 16 qualified homebuyers purchase a home in partnership with Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, and 56 homes in our community saw crucial repairs affordably completed with the help of our Home Repair team.
Back in early 2020, the ReStores found themselves in a (mostly positive) pickle: local animal rescue shelters that had been taking accumulated unsaleable fabrics and textiles from the stores could no longer accept them. The shelters, which had been using the fabrics for bedding and cleaning material, were so well supported that they no longer had any need for them. To continue keeping the unsaleable textiles out of the trash, Asheville Habitat connected with Green Zone Recycling. Green Zone, based out of Durham, NC, is the largest textile recycler in the southeast U.S. market, and they have been picking up fabric by the (increasingly large) bag from the Asheville ReStore every week since February of 2020. To date, the ReStores have recycled over 43,815 pounds of fabric through Green Zone, with 14,670 pounds recycled in 2023 alone!
The ReStores don’t just accept donations of cabinets: sometimes we go and pull them ourselves. In 2023, the ReStore’s Deconstruction team completed 82 jobs, extracting reusable building materials prior to remodels or renovations performed by local homeowners, contractors, or businesses. According to a 2018 study conducted by the EPA, “the construction industry contributed more than 600 million tons of waste to landfills, and of that 600 million, 90% was contributed from demolitions.” Our Deconstruction program not only diverts usable material from the landfill, but it also provides an important source of funding for Asheville Habitat by reselling extracted items into the community through the ReStores. Learn more about our Deconstruction program and its economic and environmental benefits in this article by Deconstruction Supervisor Colin Bristow.
61 Weaver Blvd. Weaverville, NC 28787
828-484-9432
Hours:
Tuesday - Saturday
10am-6pm
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904 Glenn Bridge Rd SE, Arden, NC 28704