YouthCare - Shelter Support Success

Volunteer Painters Set a New Tone for Pathways

The challenge: to paint the peeling interior of a three-story, 6,233-square-foot home (with huge multi-planed windows and lots of molding).
The timeline: six days.
The team: Volunteers Valerie Backus, Darby Langdon and Shannon Burbridge, along with 63 friends and family members recruited for the job.

Is it an HGTV home makeover episode? No, but maybe it should be because the transformation of Pathways, YouthCare’s residence for homeless kids under 18, is truly remarkable.

In six long days of meticulous taping, scraping, spackling, and painting, the team—inspired by the staff and young people they met at Pathways—transformed the space.

“The kids are thrilled, and I can’t wait to get here every day—it’s so lovely now,” says Karin Effland, program manager for Pathways. “There’s no doubt in my mind that if you give kids a really nice environment, they’ll rise to it, and it shows in their behavior.”

The scale of the project did not intimidate Shannon, an interior designer. “I walked in and saw a house with good bones, lots of great light,” she says. “I knew the house could be brought back.” She designed a color palette for the home, consulting on accent colors with some of the young people who live there.

The team worked with great care—dedicating whole days to taping, executing fine brushwork around the windows, and wiping drips from the floors. “You need to paint this house as if it were your own,” says John Backus, Valerie’s husband.

“Some of the children [who live at Pathways] don’t know what it’s like to be in one place for very long, or to be in a nice place, a clean place,” says Valerie, whose energy and warmth seem to propel everyone around her. “YouthCare’s job is to give these kids what most of us take for granted, and that’s an enormous undertaking,” she adds. “Staff are just too busy to take on a job like painting, and hiring someone to do it would have been incredibly expensive.”

Darby views the Pathways project as a call to action for our community.  “The economy has made it more difficult for people to contribute financially,” she notes, “but a project like this offers the opportunity to contribute in a different way.”

The team will be back in the spring to finish painting downstairs at Pathways, and they hope by then to have secured donations of new furniture and artwork. Next up on their project list: YouthCare’s Shelter Program.

YouthCare wishes to thank Jacob Forgey and Sherwin-Williams at 1921 Auburn Way North in Auburn, Washington for generously donating all the paint for this huge project, and Tony Gauci, who secured the donation for us and loaned his painting equipement.

Many of our facilities need some TLC!  To find out how you can volunteer for YouthCare contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call Mary Crandall at 206-267-3076.