Volunteers Wanted Habitat for Humanity/Montecito Cleanup

February 3, 2018

Camila Lemere

In cooperation with a number of local, national and international disaster relief organizations, Habitat for Humanity of Southern Santa Barbara County  (i.e. Goleta to Ventura) http://www.sbhabitat.org  has just started to mobilize a small army of volunteers to immediately go to work on cleaning up the muck and debris that now litters many homes and neighborhoods in Montecito. This is all part of a larger and more on-going disaster relief plan that Habitat has recently decided to take on, in addition to their normal mission of building residential housing for low income families in the community (largely though the help of volunteers). We expect that there will be much disaster relief work to do for a long time to help restore this community.
The first clean-up efforts are taking place sooner than we thought would be possible even a week ago. Habitat is moving quickly and has already secured a staging area, donations of large amounts of supplies of coveralls, masks, gloves, equipment etc.
  The first wave of debris clean-up work is now scheduled to take place in the Montecito Oaks neighborhood-one of the hardest hit areas:
  • Sunday, February 4- work day planned to end at 3 in time for the Super Bowl (go Pats! I lived in Boston…)
  • Saturday, February 10
  • Sunday, February 11
  • We really could use your help!
  This is somewhat late notice, but we are responding to conditions on the ground. If you can’t make the first work day, sign up for a later one. Understood.
 If you would like to participate (adults and children 16 or older please), email a bunch of your LCCC friends (golf, tennis, exercise, swim or social groups from LCCC- and of course any friends outside of La Cumbre who want to help and join you on the work day) and sign up. All you need is a willingness to help fill up buckets and restore lives.
  If you are interested in adding your name to the list of volunteers, have any questions or would like more information as the logistics get finalized or want to find out about future disaster relief opportunities as they come up, please email me at  [email protected] . I will pass the information on to Habitat to register you.
 If you are registering for yourself or anyone else for a specific day of this first wave of work days, please indicate which day, your name, address and the email address for each person for whom you are registering. You are welcome to sign up for multiple days. 
If you are registering for future opportunities, please just let me know that you would like to be informed about future opportunities. Please include your name, address and the email address for each person for whom you are registering to be informed about future opportunities.  Habitat will keep you informed about future work days.
The situation has been extremely fluid so bear with us a bit as logistics get nailed down.  We will be sending out details for this first wave of workdays at the end of this week to those who register but wanted to give you a chance to plan ahead and get signed up now . I may be asking a few of you to help be crew leaders for some smaller groups to help coordinate during the day (tracking equipment distributed, helping facilitate communications–like when lunch is! etc.).
If you have read this far, I hope that means you’re in!
Thanks so much to you all.
Russ Werner
La Cumbre Country Club Member
Habitat for Humanity of Southern California Board Member