Facility Description

The HOME/BASE building used to be the non-commissioned officers club. HOME was previously located in a room at Alameda High School. The students didn’t like being at a school site. They wanted their own site. Gallagher and Lindsey showed a group of students different spaces on Alameda Point, the former Alameda Naval Air Station. When the HOME members saw the building, the kids and adults liked it right away. It was nearly 11,000 square feet and modern, compared to most of the Navy buildings. Once the space was identified, HOME started a campaign to enlist support from the community to help get the space at a price we could afford. The youth made presentations before the Economic Development Commission, the Alameda Reuse and Redevelopment Authority and the City Council, and were successful in being granted a lease below the market value. The final approval was granted April 5, 2000.

Community Build Process and Status

Then we began re-modeling. For the first year, community members, youth and adults came together every Saturday and tore down walls, took out the commercial kitchen and rebuilt the space for different rooms or the youth and adults as well as the childcare center. The space was remodeled with hundreds of volunteer hours and thousands of dollars in donated materials.

But the community build process goes on. This year the students are committed to come once every moth not only to help with the building maintenance and gardening, but also a large project to seismically upgrade the building. Again teams of youth and community adults worked together under the direction of a contractor to bolt the building to the foundation.

Cleaning and Maintenance

Everyday before school ends everyone takes part in cleaning up our building. Each team is in charge of
its own space and is also given different areas of the building to clean up. We do extra cleaning, such as mopping floors and rearranging furniture, for special events. After school hours, there is an additional clean up by a janitorial service that we hired. The janitorial service is in charge of cleaning HOME Sweet HOME, the bathrooms fixtures and taking out the trash. For a high school, we have exceptionally clean bathrooms because we share these facilities and responsibility for keeping them clean.

Routine maintenance is scheduled to be done during the
Saturday builds, unless it requires specially-trained professionals, like heating and cooling, alarms and fire sprinklers.

Facility Plans for the Future

The next things we are working on are building a small kitchen, upgrading the lighting, and creating more classroom space by building walls. We also received a grant to upgrade the HOME Sweet HOME playground. This will be another project where youth and adults will work side by side.