If you're in the Three Rivers area, drop by Huss School today for our first annual Huss Future Festival! The festival features a giant rummage sale, art vendors, live music, free fair trade coffee from World Fare and tours of the building. We've even got a ping-pong challenge and an apple barrel train!
We'll see you there!
I had a short, but good conversation with a local chef the other night at a party. I jokingly asked him when he's going to start a restaurant in Three Rivers, which I'm sure he gets a lot. Turns out, it's his dream (in retirement?) to start a free restaurant: customers will enjoy healthy, expertly prepared food in a beautiful setting and pay what they can. Turns out he's also considered Huss as a location. "This is exactly the kind of project we want to see happening there," I told Rob. It's so ridiculous, it just might work--which seems to be a running theme.
So during our board meeting last Friday, when board members scattered throughout the school to read and reflect and pray, I ended up in the room where we've imagined a community kitchen. I could hear dogs barking through the broken windows and an occasional "ploop" as water dripped through the roof and into a plastic bin. A red and black sign on the window reads PEEK TUO to me, but to those who "should" be on the outside, KEEP OUT. I long for the day a sign can sincerely say, PLEASE COME IN. Sitting on the formica-topped desk that is the detritus of an institution that no longer serves this neighborhood directly, under a roof that's determined to sag in all the wrong places, that day feels very far away. And yet, it doesn't feel impossible. A sink in the corner reminds me that this room was once alive, with a controlled flow of water--that substance that is such a critical source of life.
In this room, hope is being able to peel the paper off the windows because we want people to see what's inside. Hope is a rooftop greenhouse where children and adults alike can learn how to grow fresh food year round and be nourished by the fruits of their labor. Hope is a vision of abundance for those in this neighborhood who rarely set foot in a kitchen because there's simply no food there to cook, much less eat. Hope is a multi-colored image of people from various economic backgrounds sharing conversations over a meal that satisfies all five senses. Hope is as small as a drip of water that, beyond our efforts can become a rushing stream...and hopefully, it won't be coming through a hole in the roof.
God help us.
One of our projects for this spring and summer has been figuring out how to convert a portion of the four-acre property around Huss back to wild space. We've tried to delineate the area with clear boundaries so that our neighbors won't just think we're neglecting the land, but even then, we're still getting some quizzical looks: so you're not going to mow it?
Well, we are mowing a portion of it. We have a path that goes around the entire back property for walking, an area carved out for a fire pit and a large lawn in the back corner for softball, soccer and other activities. We're also mowing the front yard and around the community garden.
But there are many advantages to letting a portion of the property go wild, including...
Last weekend, we walked through Huss School with an architect (a friend of a friend) to get an informal but professional opinion of the building. The good news: the building is structurally very sound. The bad news: the building needs new mechanical systems and presents a number of architectural challenges. We learned a lot from the visit and it was good to have our overall suspicions professionally confirmed.
The biggest mechanical item that we'll need to replace is the 90-something-year-old boiler. Replacing the heating system for a building as large as Huss will be a significant expense and will take quite a bit of planning. We also will need to address the current electrical system--which has been cobbled together over the years and stands in need of updating. Another big ticket item will be replacing the windows and creating a better envelope for the interior (so heating and cooling won't escape as readily).
So ... those are the big things we're going to need to address in renovation. Before we can get started, we need to have an official feasibility study done to determine potential and concrete next steps. Unfortunately, a feasibility study will cost a good amount of money in itself. We're working to find grants that might cover the costs of the study; in the meantime, we need to get the point where we can pay our monthly expenses.
What happens when you get a couple of brilliant, creative, visionary community organizers together around the kitchen table for tea? Great things begin to grow--literally! We are so thrilled to welcome the efforts of Julianna and Brenda to the Huss School property for the coming growing season. It was a delight to walk with them through the first couple meetings about a community garden and we look forward to seeing where they take the project as they run with the idea on their own. The basics: plots will be tended by neighborhood youth and adult mentors, using sustainable agricultural methods like compost tea, organic pest control and rainwater collection. This project has enormous potential to tie in with the vision for the school property in a myriad of ways and bring an abundance of hope, creativity, beauty and good food to the neighborhood. Watch for more reports on the gardens soon...and get in touch if you'd like to be involved!
On the way to work this morning, we heard two stories from Michigan Public Radio that sparked connections for me with the Huss School project. One was about an old school building in Detroit that's being converted into artist studios, retail space, offices and more. The other was this week's edition in a series of interviews that Christina Shockley is doing, with each interviewee suggesting three things they think could be done in Michigan to help get the state back on its feet. I especially liked how hip hop artist Invincible, this morning's interviewee, suggested that creativity needs to be woven into our problem-solving in order to expand people's imaginations and push the boundaries of what's considered possible. Makes me even more excited to try to recruit local artists to submit renderings of the space's potential...
Kirstin offers a few ideas in her catapult magazine editorial for what she'd love to see at Huss School as we move forward with the Imagining Space project. Check it out and then add your own!
We'll be hosting a film class and a spring break trip--both from Calvin College--at Huss in the next few months and we're going to do quite a bit of preparation if we're to be properly hospitable. The school is currently winterized (no heat, no running water), so we're going to treat it a bit like indoor winter camping. We'd ideally like to get one room operable with electric space heaters, coffee makers and some comfortable seating.
Toward that end, we've started a list of things we're looking for to help stock our hospitality room. If you'd be able to donate any of these items, please contact us!
We're also doing a workday next Tuesday, December 29, to get the room set up for the film class in January. If you're in the area and would like to help, drop us a line and show up around 9:00 in the morning. We'll have some coffee on!
On Friday, June 12, we closed on Huss School. On Tuesday, June 16, Rob and I hit the road for a two-week speaking tour. The two weeks since our return from the tour have been a whirlwind of trying to catch up and stay on top of the many projects that have converged on us all at once this summer, in addition to trying to negotiate a shaky housing situation for us here in Grand Rapids. And so, finally spending two hours tending to (part of) the lawn at Huss School this past Saturday felt like a great accomplishment.
Rob worked with a borrowed mower while I trimmed and weeded. Even though we were exhausted from an already-full day of physical labor, it felt good to begin to engage more intimately with the property than just the tours we and others have taken of the building itself. The next few years will definitely be a process of getting to know the cracks in the sidewalk, the curves of the lawn, the species of weeds that spring up naturally when no one is looking. My work gloves once again bear the familiar scent--I think it smells like peanut butter--of the Tree to Heaven sprouts that I used to pull from my great grandparents' property in Indiana. I had brought a metal bucket with me for collecting weeds, but soon realized that it was way too small. In the school are a number of blue plastic bins that were used for storing teaching supplies, so I hauled one out and filled it up. Half-joking, I told Rob that this box would forever remain with the Huss School property and heretofore be known as The Weed Coffin: where weeds go to die.
I've been feeling stressed out lately about caring properly for the property, especially when it seems to be such a draw for vandalism. There have been three more broken windows since we closed and imagining what's happening there beyond our control keeps me up at night. But as repetitive labor often does, I had some clarity while I was pulling out the tallest weeds along the front of the school: I need to pray for God's protection around the space as we work to transform inclinations toward destruction into a sense of community ownership. I met Officer Huhnke from the Three Rivers Police Department while we were there and he kindly offered to let his shift know about the change in ownership and help watch over the property.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be working on finding a donated or reduced price mower--riding, as it took Rob two hours to do just the front with a push mower and, if we're really fortunate, a diesel model so we can work with biodiesel for fuel. Once we have the tools in place at the school, someone has offered to help supervise volunteers or perhaps folks from the local probation office for ongoing maintenance, which will be a great start for the community ownership we need, both for us personally and for the good of the project in the future.
One of the big ideas for the space that results from the Imagining Space campaign is an off-campus program for college students. In the course of shared meals, grocery trips, concerts and other activities with our student friends at Calvin College, we've come to realize the value of simply doing life together as a means of collaboratively learning what a richly formed, Kingdom-oriented life might look like. Building on these experiences, we'd like to cultivate a space in which inquisitive students can have these kinds of formative encounters with each other and with mentors and teachers.
While we've spent a lot of time brainstorming about this program, we haven't fully developed a specific plan; in part, this is because the program will look different depending on the space we're able to secure for it. Assuming, though, that we'll be able to purchase Huss School, here are a few ideas for what that program might look like: