Do Good: Many Hands Make Light Work
Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 11:58AM 
Rebuilding lives and homes
By Lisa Littlewood
Tom Splain, 76, is not completely sure how he ended up spending the last fifteen years helping to build homes for those in need. After retiring from more than three decades of work as a high-school teacher in East Aurora, Splain found himself, to put it simply, a bit bored.
“I had been retired for about six years,” he said, “You need to find some outside interests [after you retire]. I knew I liked this type of work and so I thought I’d try it to see if I would fit in.” And fit in he does. So much so that Dan Gallagher, the young Americorp volunteer who was working as the site manager at a house on Buffum Street in South Buffalo on a warm June day introduces the modest, elderly man to me as “the boss.”
Splain smirks quietly and walks back up the three flights of stairs to the attic hallway where he is working diligently to fit a piece of drywall into an angular wall section with his friend (and former co-worker) of 46 years, Harold Boniface.
When I catch Bonfiace and Splain in the hot attic hallway it is evident that these guys enjoy both the meaningfulness of their work and the camaraderie with the other volunteers. They joke and tell stories. I attempt to take a picture of the two men, but Harold’s back is facing me.
“It’s your better side anyways,” Boniface says to him.
They laugh and then pose, somewhat hesitantly, for the picture.
When I talk to Splain several weeks later and mention the apparent jovialness of the job site he says, “That’s the way it usually is. It’s casual. If you don’t finish a job someone else will.”
He adds that the people he works with are one of his favorite parts of the job.
Many Hands Make Light Work
Splain and Boniface are just two of thousands of volunteers who volunteer some bit of their time helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity. They all come for different reasons, with different backgrounds and with varying skill levels. Habitat will take anyone who is over 16 and “has a desire to work.”
This past summer Habitat benefitted from the able hands of corporate groups like HSBC, Merck Pharmaceuticals and M&T Bank, to name a few, as well as a number of work groups from around the country (often teen church groups) from places as far away as Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island and Lincoln, Nebraska. Then there are the local church and community groups as well as the “regulars”, people like Splain, Boniface and a number of other friendly faces I met on Buffum Street, who come weekly, often several times a week.
Volunteers are so essential to the work that is done that members of the organization refer to the time it takes to build a house not in days or months, but in volunteer hours.
“It takes about 4,000 volunteer hours to build a new house and about 8,000 volunteer hours to do a re-hab,” says Margaret Tolboys, co-founder of Habitat for Humanities, Buffalo affiliate.
Tolboys recounts a conversation she had with a businessman several years ago who commented in awe about the amount of work completed by a work force made up almost entirely of volunteers. “This is the only business structure I know of,” he said, “ in which you don’t know where your workers are going to come from on a day to day basis and yet the work always gets done.”
Tolboys almost laughs as she shares this story. She finds it amazing too, even after 26 years on the job, that the work always seems to get done.
Despite the massive coordination of thousands of individuals (often as many as 1,000 people in one month alone), working on several different projects, under varying project managers the work always gets done. Daily. Weekly. Monthly. For 26-years now. 217 houses later. With close to 1,000 people having been put into Buffalo homes (including over 500 children) since Margaret and her husband Ron began this endeavor in 1985.
It’s really quite amazing.
Margaret Tolboys is pretty modest about it all. If you ask her why she has committed the last 26 years to Habitat or how it all gets done, she says, in the most casual way, that it is “simply what we are supposed to be doing” and that when they first started they took it “one house at a time.”
A Match ‘Made in Heaven’
Margaret and Ron met when they were teenagers doing similar types of service projects through their own church together, and have been together ever since.
Perhaps it was a ‘match made in heaven’, literally, that these two found each other as teens, got married and were eventually presented with an opportunity to start Habitat here in Buffalo (they have been married for 48 years).
“Doing this kind of work, starting the affiliate,” she says, “was just a continuation of what we had been doing in our teen years, which was doing service and helping others. We do it because of our faith in God and his direction to help those in need.”
And, while the Tolboys efforts have impacted and blessed thousands, Margaret feels that they have, in fact, been the ones who have been blessed.
“It all just comes under God’s blessing. You never know where things will take you…I have met so many wonderful people who give of themselves. We stand in amazement at how dedicated people are. I probably would have never met most of them if it wasn’t for Habitat.”
How it All Began
Ironically, it was a husband and wife team that started Habitat for Humanity International in the 1970’s. Millard Fuller, the organizations founder, was an incredibly business savvy entrepreneur who had become a self-made millionaire by the age of 29. Unfortunately, his health and marriage both suffered as a result of the time and energies he had poured into his business pursuits.
According to Habitat Humanities website, the Fuller’s decided to do some soul searching. They eventually agreed to sell everything they owned, give all of their money to the poor and find a more meaningful way to live.
Their journey took them to a small-town, Christian farm community outside of Americus, GA (the current home to Habitat International). Through talks with like-minded people in the community they started several ministry projects, one of which was building houses for the poor.
Following a biblical passage that says someone lending money to the poor should not charge interest (Exodus 22:25), they chose to build houses on a no-profit, no interest basis, therefore making the homes affordable to families with low incomes.
Several years later Fuller convinced several businessmen to make an investment in his work and in 1976 Habitat for Humanity was officially born.
It was just nine years later, in 1985 that some Habitat workers approached Margaret and Ron Tolboys, asked them to come to Americus, GA to see what was happening and start their own affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y.
When they started out Ron was working as a manager at General Motors leaving him to work on houses and coordinate volunteers in his spare time, mostly nights and weekends.
When asked how they started such a successful organization while raising children, and with her husband working full-time, Margaret says, “One house at a time.”
Indeed, in the beginning, Habitat built one new house a year. Eventually, as their volunteer power grew, as the Tolboys began to have more time (as their two sons grew older) and eventually with Ron retiring from General Motors, they were able to focus more and more of their time and energies into Habitat for Humanity.
And, unlike Boniface who had a longing to find something to do with his newfound free time after retirement, Margaret jokes that that was never an issue for her husband Ron; it was as if Habitat had been waiting all along for him to come on board full-time.
I asked Margaret how working together on such a large effort has impacted their marriage. She laughed and said it isn’t always easy, but that they have enjoyed it immensely.
Tom Splain and Harold Boniface, both 76 years old and regular volunteers for Habitat “Ron is an phenomenal leader,” she said, “He was at GM and he is at Habitat. I see things differently than he does sometimes, but it enhances what we do, what we present to the board. Because we can talk about things and talk them through our combined thoughts often amount to something better than either of us would have come up with on our own...sometimes quietly and sometimes not so quietly. As you struggle through things though, you understand yourselves, each other and often the mission even better…you become more convinced of it.”
The Strength of Buffalo and Its People
Tolboys says that the city of Buffalo has been quite supportive of their work, often selling Habitat vacant lots (according to Habitat’s website) for a mere $1. She says that the people of Buffalo are also a hard working and dedicated breed.
“There is a dedication to physical work [here in Buffalo] because we are a blue collar area,” says Margaret. There is also still a real commitment to the religious life. A lot of volunteers come because of their faith commitments. That faith life propels people to come out and work. Buffalo is a big-hearted community.”
In addition to the traditional hand-on, carpentry type work Habitat also needs volunteers at its two ReStore locations in Buffalo. ReStore offers new and used furniture and appliances, household items and building materials at a low cost with all of the proceeds being put right back into the building of new homes in the community.
To find out more about Habitat for Humanity and how you can get involved visit their website at www.habitatbuffalo.org. In addition to the Buffalo affiliate others have developed in the last several years, those communities include nearby Lockport, Attica, Batavia and Medina, all in need of volunteers.!
