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The Samaritan Center on Lee Highway and Ooltewah United Methodist Church joined forces to provide an Ooltewah family with a new home and a new lease on life this fall.
“I’ve been praying that I could get a new home,” Barbara Strickland told a crowd as she entered her double-wide mobile home. “And I want to thank everyone that helped this happen. God is going to live in this house.”
Strickland had lived in a leaky, cracking mobile home with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Members of Ooltewah United Methodist Church worked to outfit Barbara Strickland’s new home with furniture and appliances. From left are OUMC senior pastor Ramon Torres, resident Barbara Strickland and church business manager Sarah Roach.
Strickland owns the property and has lived there for 21 years. After her husband, Leon, passed away in 2006, she realized she couldn’t maintain it alone, and her grandchildren didn’t know how to help.
A damaging storm was the last straw, and Strickland called the Samaritan Center.
“I could sit in my living room and look out cracks,” Strickland said.
Sharon Smith-Hensley, director of social services at the Samaritan Center, began researching repair programs and found Diane White of the Tennessee Housing Development Agency Emergency Repair Program for the Elderly.
White said repairing Strickland’s home was out of the question but found another mobile home in foreclosure for the right price.
The Samaritan Center contributed $5,000 and THDA donated $10,000.
“When I put the word out I started getting anonymous donations,” Smith-Hensley said.
Meanwhile, OUMC had discovered the family’s situation as well. Strickland’s granddaughter, Amber Tant, had joined the church choir.
“Once we knew that this family needed something, it just spread like wildfire through the church,” said church business manager Sarah Roach.
The church arranged for local businesses to donate furniture, mattresses and appliances to make Strickland’s new house a home.
“They’re happy,” Roach said. “They’ve got a new beginning.”
Strickland will share the three-bedroom, two-bath home with three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
“I told them we can have get-togethers and cookouts,” Strickland said.
Tant, 20, will have her own room and will enroll in Chattanooga State Technical Community College in January. She said she’ll continue to help her grandmother manage her medicine and medical appointments while in school.
“I did it when I was in high school, so I can do it now,” Tant said.
In all, 18 local organizations collaborated to clear the yard, demolish the old structure, and install and ready the new home.
Strickland’s oldest granddaughter, Bridgett Crawford, and her family, who live in Apison, helped clear the junk out of the yard.
“I’m happy for her,” Crawford said. “She deserves it.”
Smith-Hensley said a project of this magnitude is the first of its kind for the Samaritan Center.
“This is a one-time endeavor right now,” Smith-Hensley said. “We saw the need and said, ‘What do we do?’ We just have to wait and see because we obviously don’t have the funding to do this all the time.”
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