For everyone who works for or with Welcome Home Angel, renovating a house is about more than adding aesthetic appeal or indulging in the latest trends. It’s about improving functionality and creating a safe, accessible environment for friends and neighbors who could use a helping hand.
“It might seem like it’s just helping one child at a time,” said Craig Wagner, the nonprofit’s CEO, “but it’s all part of an ongoing effort to meet these needs for the whole community.”
In 2007, Welcome Home Angel’s president and founder, John Kaiser, learned of a couple of local kids whose families faced uncertain futures due to a serious injury and a life-changing diagnosis. From there, the organization was formed on the foundation of helping to provide children as young as 4 and young adults as old as 21 living in the Wilmington area with custom living arrangements to accommodate them as they and their parents or guardians learned to cope with their chronic illnesses or injuries.
Wagner was hired in 2021. Welcome Home Angel briefly closed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which he said that some families were isolated not only because of the shutdown and social distancing protocols in place, but because of a lack of disability access. Since then, he’s seen a significant increase in projects undertaken by the organization and has been a part of expanding its services and the range of eligible applicants it can assist.
“There’s a huge need for these services for all ages,” Wagner said.
The nonprofit organization operates daily with a smaller staff but also has a core base of 40 to 50 volunteers to assist the design teams creating stable home environments that can be maintained for years to come. These efforts include addressing narrow doorways and installing reliable outdoor ramps that hold up under severe weather, as well as setting up rooms dedicated to specific therapy techniques.
The work is done on a case-by-case basis to ensure that everyone gets what they need, including the siblings and other family members taking care of their loved ones who require special health care and home modifications. It isn’t just individuals who can pitch in; contractors and other local businesses have lent their services and expertise to projects in the past and can continue to do so by reaching out to Welcome Home Angel directly.
“It’s a really tangible experience that allows everyone to be a part of a solution, not just the diagnosis,” Wagner said. “And focusing on the unique aspects of each case helps us all understand and keep in mind a person’s needs not just for today, but five or 10 years in the future.”
The future is looking even brighter with the initiatives Welcome Home Angel will be continuing to expand this year. To help meet goals of long-term sustainability and nationwide reach, programs like virtual consultations and kits for families that reside out of the organization’s usual service area – also known as Bedroom in a Box – are being revisited and fine-tuned for optimal impact. The latter is expected to prove especially effective for households that only require home upgrades on a smaller scale and can implement these adjustments themselves with the right information and resources.
Over the holidays at the end of 2024, Wagner said that one such package was sent to a family in Columbus County.
“The idea behind this,” he said, “is to share our best practices so we can better serve others in and outside the Wilmington area.”
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