Brothers Redevelopment Inc.
Joe Giron, President
1111 Osage St., Suite 210
Denver, Colo. 80204
(303) 892-8345
(303) 892-8352 fax

It has been almost 24 years since Jose Giron and Manny Rodriguez started asking WHY the members of their community didn't have decent housing and couldn't seem to get it, and during that time, the program they started has made a difference in the housing situation for some 20,000 families in Denver and throughout Colorado.

Giron, an outspoken, charismatic leader who laughingly acknowledges that he is approaching "senior citizen" status, said he was long troubled by a simple question that arose when his father, a miner in Trinidad, Colo., lost his job when the mine closed -- and the company tore down the houses that it had built for its workers. His feelings crystallized, he said, after he attended a short course in Christianity sponsored by the Catholic Church. "I was asking myself, 'Why do we always have the poorest houses?', he said. "They tore the houses down. Why?"

He says he and his friend Rodriguez, with the guidance of a Mennonite minister and a Lutheran minister, began thinking about power and what it meant, and that led eventually to the creation of Brothers Redevelopment, a concept that they initially and still define as "helping people house each other." At first it involved nothing more than going out and helping a neighbor fix up his house. Then that neighbor would join them to go fix another's house, and they'd go on to another until, as Giron says, "We'd have an army."

Over the years, the program grew, spinning off new and different approaches to fixing houses, building houses, helping people buy and rent decent houses, and helping people stay in their houses through hard times. Now it has a staff of 28 and a $3.5 million annual budget.

Among its many projects, Brothers still operates its original volunteer home-repair and maintenance program, mobilizing volunteers from throughout the community to help poor and disabled homeowners -- nearly 900 of them last year -- make repairs and keep their houses in good shape. Its Neighborhood Caretakers program, "Adopt a Block," leverages corporate contributions of cash and money with city funds to sweep through an entire urban block with a major clean-up, paint-up, fix-up effort aimed at literally cleaning the face of a neighborhood. The annual "Paint-a-Thon," now statewide, uses volunteer labor and donated or low-cost paint and equipment to repaint the exteriors of nearly 1,000 houses across the state on a single summer day each year.

Brothers' property-management arm manages five housing projects for elderly residents. Its Construction Program rehabilitates and builds low-cost housing under contract from other regional non-profit organizations. And the Home Counseling Program provides both pre-purchase counseling to help low-income families qualify for mortgages and handle the financing, and foreclosure counseling to keep families from losing their houses during hard economic times.

Giron never stops dreaming. His latest hope, a potential national model, would establish a complex series of partnerships among local, state and federal government, non-profits and the financial industry, nudged by the Community Reinvestment Act, to organize a half-dozen mortgage banks as contributors AND board members of a fund to build and finance housing for low-income families.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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