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Greater Chicago Chapter
Our Greater Chicago IAHSP Regional Chapter participated in the Worldwide Staging Service Day on September 16, 2006. We chose to help a well respected local agency, Seguin Services, dedicated to helping severely disabled children and adults. Seguin provides a wide range of services from foster care to job training assistance to hospice.
We "Staged to Live" a vacant residential property in Broadview, IL that will soon be home to six profoundly disabled adults and their caregivers. This house had badly damaged hardwood floors and an "institutional feel" that our ASPs transformed into a warm and comfortable place to call home. Truly, our mission went beyond traditional staging. We "set up house" for residents with special needs, and started with virtually nothing in place.
Twenty-one ASPs, family and friends, worked together tirelessly on our service project, several coming from more than 100 miles away. We even had two junior stagers helping us! Our volunteers were extremely generous with their time, talent, and resources. Many large furniture items were donated from staging inventories or purchased new especially for this project. The ASPs approached this charity project with tremendous creativity, professionalism, hard work and love for people they would probably never meet.
This project presented unique staging challenges that were carefully considered prior to service day. Many of the residents are wheelchair bound, and some of them have behavioral, physical and psychological limitations that make it necessary to keep their home environment as sturdy, safe, and practical as possible. Any staging accessories, furniture and art brought into the house had to be safe for the residents, thus eliminating many of the typical staging items we are accustomed to using.
Our ASP volunteers brought furniture, painted a dated 1970s faux fireplace surround and the wrought iron railing on the front steps, staged 6 bedrooms complete with bedding and art, assembled gift baskets for each resident, painted the dark brown entry paneling a soft buttery yellow, painted the newly installed front door, washed all of the windows, painted a formerly institutional ADA bathroom creating a spa-like redesign, cleaned the kitchen and filled the cabinets with everything from tableware, cookware, small appliances and pantry staples, contributed handmade window treatments throughout the house, and provided a new bathroom vanity, sink, faucet and toilet.
Representatives from Seguin, including the President/CEO of the organization, toured the home while it was being staged and could not believe the transformation that was occurring before their eyes. Seguin Services staff thanked all of the volunteers for "making this house into a home" for their residents to enjoy.
The Greater Chicago Chapter of IAHSP would like to thank the IAHSP Foundation for its grant, a former staging client who refinished the hardwood floors and made them look new again, Brook Furniture Rental for providing four complete bedroom sets, Home Depot, Target, and Lowe’s for gift cards and merchandise discounts, ASP family members for their cash donations, and all of the ASP volunteers who contributed in such meaningful ways to make this house so beautiful.
Submitted by Margaret Scully Granzeier, ASP, IAHSP Ambassador
Visit the Greater Chicago Chapter Website.
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