A local veteran will have a new home, mortgage free, soon thanks to more than 100 volunteers.
A Soldier’s Journey Home (ASJH), a nonprofit organization devoted to building custom homes for wounded and disabled combat veterans, has been working on a 2,500-square foot home in Evans’ Brandywine neighborhood since May 19.
The home is for Army Sgt. 1st Class David Mathis, a retired veteran of both the Army and the Marines, who lost both of his legs due to an IED blast in 2017 while deployed in Iraq.
Consulting with the Semper Fi & America’s Fund, another nonprofit devoting to supporting injured servicemembers, ASJH seeks candidates who live in areas it intends to build. Semper Fi regularly works with local organizations, such as the Wounded Warrior Project, from which ASJH can review potential recipients, explains communications director Sharon Holland.
“They give us like a couple of candidates, and then we go through their background, and then we kind of vet that,” Holland said. “And then we have we talk to them, and then our board of directors meets and goes over all of that and makes the decision as to which one we think we can support that year.”
While Mathis got to hammer one of the first nails and visit the site, like all recipients, he’s not scheduled to see the home until completion. The house, which will sit on four acres and overlook a pond, will include modifications to maximize its accessibility, such as widened doorways, lowered cabinets and a roll-in shower.
Most of the 120 volunteer construction workers are out-of-towners who regularly participate in builds, and many are current for former military, law enforcement or firefighters. ASJH feeds the volunteers and lodges them in local hotels, but no salaries are distributed.
Many participants would say the opportunity to build is its own compensation.
“It’s like a high. I can’t feel this level of reward with anything else I do,” said volunteer David Esser. “That’s why I tell people: they’re like, ‘you do that for two weeks at a time for free?’ And I’m like, ‘yeah!’ You’ve just got to come and do it.”
A Soldier’s Journey Home started in 2014, and Mathis’ house will be its 11th build. The catalyst for its founding were New York City firefighters looking to give back to the country in return for its support after 9/11, volunteering at disaster sites. The firefighters began meeting the same group of volunteers over time.
“We wanted to focus on veterans, so we decided to make our own and build this out. We would start projects but never finish them, and leave them to somebody else,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, president of ASJH, about the charity’s origins, with firefighters working with other charities. “I said, you know, it’s not right. We should finish it. So we started our own organization where we finished a house in two weeks.”
The organization applies the incident command system (ICS), a standardized emergency-response management system used by government agencies for emergency responses, to coordinate 14-day constructions, which, in the case of the Mathis family home, entailed roughly 11-hour workdays.
“This is a family reunion,” Fitzpatrick said, noting that it’s “flat-out patriotism” that draws the hosts of volunteers to reconvene for a rigorously regimented two-week job that seems to become a source of camaraderie among its participants. “It’s a family reunion that builds a house every year.”
The Mathis home is scheduled for completion on May 30. For more information on A Soldier’s Journey Home, visit its website at https://www.asoldiersjourneyhome.org/.
Skyler Andrews is a reporter covering business for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
