For the past three years, Columbia Habitat for Humanity has sent a team over spring break to volunteer with Lafayette Habitat for Humanity, located in the south of the sweet, swampy state of Louisiana. Columbia Habitat Special Programs Coordinator and spring break trip leader Julia Peck (CC ’16) selected Lafayette as our partner affiliate in 2013 because of the deep connection our two Habitat chapters share: the ongoing work of rebuilding a community after a destructive hurricane. Lafayette faces a unique challenge in that it has to deal with a huge spike in population growth due to environmental refugees, 5,000 of whom settled permanently in Lafayette after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This made already-rare affordable housing incredibly scarce in Lafayette; now, overcrowded and unstable housing situations are common in Louisiana’s third-largest city.

This need to house a rapidly growing population is where our Habitat spring break team enters. This year, from March 16^th to the 20^th, our team of seven installed trim, did caulking and spackling work, and painted the exterior of the future home of the Cormier family. At the end of this week of work, our team and the team from the Ohio State University all received Lafayette Habitat for Humanity shirts as a sign of thanks. On the back of the shirt, the French phrase “Bâtir du fond du cœur” sat above a modified version of the flag of Acadiana, the French cultural region of Louisiana of which Lafayette serves as the hub. Below was the English translation: “Building from the heart.”

However, in the fall semester, when we talked to Lafayette Habitat directors about what the returning Columbia team could do to contribute to their chapter, we learned that collegiate spring break teams that visit their affiliate did not always follow the mantra of building from the heart. Some are unmotivated and less than serious about building, unable to sustain high-quality work throughout the day. Many teams request to build only half-days, substantially reducing the amount of work that gets and increasing the time that the future homeowner has to wait to move into their first owned home.

Then, we realized: many Habitat Collegiate Challenge teams simply are not learning the story of this community and the urgency of Habitat’s work here. Lafayette Habitat’s directors suggested that this might be best communicated peer-to-peer. They hoped we could somehow synthesize the research that our team did leading up to the trip about affordable housing in Lafayette, the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the integrality of Habitat in the Lafayette city government’s plans for development, and the beauty of Cajun/Creole culture, and share it with incoming college volunteers. In that moment, our introductory Collegiate Challenge video project was born: we would create a film that Lafayette Habitat could show to future college volunteers at the beginning of their workweek. It would be an informative, empowering tool to enhance volunteer work during Lafayette Habitat’s busiest construction season.

Our work on the video, led by trip co-leader Jacoby Shelton (CC ’16), began last fall. We entered the Barnes & Noble College #BNCInstaBuild Challenge, which asked college chapters to make a 15-second Instagram video about why Habitat is so important. We submitted, and eventually won one of the two grand prizes: $5,000! This, combined with the support of family, friends, and community donors, put us on fantastic financial ground to move forward and take a team of seven builders and filmmakers to Lafayette once again.

Able to afford our trip, we dived in to trying to plan out what our video would look like and ensuring that the Lafayette community’s voice was heard. To do this, we interviewed Joelle Boudreaux, Lafayette’s Volunteer Services Director, as well as the Chief Development Officer of the Lafayette Consolidated Government. We also interviewed volunteers from the Ohio State University, who built with us, to get a sense of why they did the work that they do and how they stayed motivated. We plan on supplementing these interviews with our own interviews and explanations of affordable housing, Habitat for Humanity’s work, and how much volunteers really matter.

The video is a work-in-progress, but we’re excited to soon be able to leave this with the Lafayette affiliate to show to incoming Collegiate Challenge teams. It is our hope, in partnership with Lafayette Habitat for Humanity, that this video communicates urgency and encouragement – from one group of volunteers to another – to keep fighting with our hands and hammers for affordable housing for low-income folks, and to ensure that we all are building from informed minds and determined hearts.