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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: Habitat house honors Blake family VECO leads effort to build Habitat for Humanity house for Anchorage family, as memorial to family of VECO engineer Steve Sutherlin Petroleum News Associate Editor
A new Habitat for Humanity house is rising in Anchorage’s Mountain View neighborhood, to honor the sister and parents of VECO engineer Jennifer Blake.
Blake lost her family in a July 2004 plane crash.
Blake is leading the building crew for the house, and is actively involved in fundraising. She took donations and sold memorial boards to be used in constructing the house at a June 14 barbeque fundraising event in the VECO building parking lot.
Blake said the idea of building a house to honor her family originated with Tom Maloney at VECO.
“Tom and my mom were friends, and he had the idea of building a Habitat house in honor of my family, Blake said. “He asked me if I wanted to do that, and said VECO would support it.”
When Maloney first proposed the idea, Blake had reservations.
“I know how much work goes into a Habitat house and at the time I could barely keep myself together, so I drug my feet, but after a while I decided it would be a very positive thing to turn all of that grief in the community into hope for a family, so I agreed to it,” Blake said. “It’s been very healing, I think, for a lot of people.”
Maloney’s son had been in the kindergarten class of Blake’s mother, Sigrid. Sigrid Blake and Curtiss Blake, Jennifer’s father, were career teachers in the Anchorage School District. Curtiss Blake taught music, and was also a composer.
Jennifer’s sister, Christina, worked at VECO for more than ten years, and was instrumental in encouraging Jennifer to come to work at VECO.
“VECO contributed $20,000 to the build and has asked employees to match that,” Blake said. “We need to raise $100,000, so the other $60,000 is going to come from the community.”
Blake said she expects additional donations to come from individuals, not corporations. She is confident about the fundraising effort because of all the lives her family has touched in the community.
The support of VECO has been vital to getting the Blake House project off the ground, she said.
“Tom Maloney is organizing the entire Blake House with the rest of the community, so it’s a huge effort that VECO and Tom have taken on,” she said. Learning experience The Blake House is not the first time Blake has been involved with building; she first volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in 2001.
“I helped build a single family home across from Mountain View School. That was my first introduction to building at all,” she said.
Building the Habitat house was an education, Blake said, but the process was not intimidating at all because of the organization’s approach to including volunteers in its crews.
“Habitat’s goal is to teach people,” she said. “You’re never supposed to turn somebody away who doesn’t know how to build; you’re supposed to teach them how.”
After building with Habitat for Humanity, Blake had the confidence to build her own home on the Anchorage hillside with the help of her parents and her sister. The experience of seeing her own house going up gave her a greater feeling for the excitement the Habitat house families have when they see their own house rise from the ground. Lots of sweat equity In addition to making a down payment with closing costs and interest-free mortgage payments, recipient families work alongside volunteers on the construction crew for their homes. Habitat houses are built with a contribution of at least 400 hours of “sweat equity” and labor on the part of the partner families, according to Habitat for Humanity.
“For me, I find so much reward in building next to the family that gets the house — it’s just an incredible feeling,” she said. “I built my own house; I know what it’s like to get your own house, to see it going up, how excited you are — this is your house.”
Blake said she had a comfortable upbringing, so it’s hard to imagine the full extent of the change a Habitat house makes in the lives of the recipient families.
These families come from conditions where they live in substandard housing I couldn’t imagine — no heat in the winters, run down trailers, single bedrooms for families of four and six.” Blake said. “For them to have this house going up, building their own house, it’s magnified a thousand fold — the excitement — to where I’ve seen the mom crying and the children picking out their rooms, screaming.” Duplex The Blake house is one half of a duplex. The other side is being built by the Energy Partners, a group of energy companies formed to make a difference in the community. VECO has been a part of the Energy Partners in the past, and Blake’s previous involvement with Habitat for Humanity was through the group.
This year’s house is the sixth Energy Partners house in Anchorage, according to Mark Lynch of Unocal, a spokesman for the group.
This year, the Energy Partnership is comprised of: Unocal Alaska, ExxonMobil, BP Exploration (Alaska), Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., ConocoPhillips Alaska, ASRC, Schlumberger, Veritas, Petrotechnical Resources of Alaska, Armstrong Oil & Gas, Epoch Well Services, Flint Hills Resources, Pioneer Natural Resources Alaska, and NANA/Colt, he said.
Lynch said the partners miss VECO as a member, but are glad to be working together with the company on the Blake House/Energy Partners project.
“VECO has always been a very strong member of the Energy Partners, and they’ve got some of the most talented work crews, being in construction and engineering and things like that,” Lynch said. “We’ve always relied on their talent to help us build these houses, so we were sorry to lose them in the Energy Partnership, but we were very happy to support them in conjunction with the Energy Partnership — the fit having them work on half of the house along with us is just perfect.”
Lynch said the projects have been very gratifying, and they are a great way to give back to the community.
“Habitat’s mission is to build simple affordable housing; they’re nothing fancy; they’re not custom homes by any means,” he said. “They’re good, solid, energy efficient — a good living space for people who are living in substandard housing.”
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