Twice a year, Piedmont Community Service Crew does RTO (Rebuilding Together Oakland) project in which members we renovate a local low-income senior’s home over the course of two Saturdays. RTO is a non profit organization that brings volunteers together to repair homes of low income homeowners in Oakland. There is always one in October and one in April, with April being the biggest and most popular event of the year, according to Junior Elaine Qian.
PCSC started working with RTO seven years ago according to founder Ken Li, and as time went on the number of people who signed up to participate gradually increased.
“We do these twice a year now and we really get a lot done because we are working as a team which makes it more compelling because we feel like we accomplish something because we do it with a group,” Li said.
He realized that students could do pretty much any task that an adult could do as long as they had advice from experienced adults. This is why he started to recruit more members in the community.
“Crew members can really feel like this is their project and be proud of it at the end that they got this amazing task done,” Li said.
Three years ago, the crew started having members become leaders in the project. Now the student leaders are called Youth House Captains. Junior Elaine Qian is the current Youth House Captain.
“We fund the project by collecting annual PCSC membership dues, getting donations, fundraising,” Qian said.
In the past, the budget for RTO was $5,000 but this year they challenged themselves to rev it up to $7,500 to support the whole project independently from RTO funding. They have surpassed that amount this year, due to the amount of generous donations.
“There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes behind the project to make the workdays run smoothly for the 50 or so volunteers,” Qian said.
Qian is the Youth House Captain and works with Juniors Vanessa Li and Jojo Yee who are the Co- volunteer coordinators. They work with Steven Schiller, Tom Ramsey, Ken Li and Stephen Shoup from buildingLab to identify and plan each task that needs to be completed within the two nine hour workdays, as well as coordinate with the homeowner and the many other people involved in the project.
“The renovations are, of course, specific to the house, but we always paint the interior and exterior of the house. In previous projects, we’ve also built a deck, replaced windows, did flooring, gardening and a bunch of other tasks,” Qian said.
Each year, PCSC picks a house from a variety of tenants that RTO selects. In picking each house, they examine the personality of the tenant, as well as their socioeconomic status and the current shape that the house is in.
“The house usually has a range of things wrong with it. Things like how big is the house is how far away is it, if there is a place to park and eat lunch and set up are important things to look at,” Li said.
In terms of technical work, the house should be able to accommodate a large number of volunteers.
“Typically, we look for a house that has lots of painting. Two thirds of the people like to paint and it does not require a whole lotta skill. It takes a fair amount of time and its a good way to put people to work,” Li said.
She said that although RTO can be exhausting, it is a lot of fun to do with friends and it is also extremely gratifying to see the difference they have made on the houses and the homeowners lives.
“Plus, donated food from places like La Farine is a quick fix when you start to run out of fuel,” Qian said.
Qian said that they are also trying to transition the name from venture crew to Piedmont Community Service Crew (PCSC for short) because venturing is actually an organization in itself; “there are a bunch of ‘venture crews’ in the nation and we’re just a venture crew that focuses primarily on community service,” she said.
This year’s workdays will be April 27 8am-5pm and May 4 8am-5pm. Sign up by emailing pcservicecrew.org;
PCSC members get priority.
