The Cornerstone Home Team is once again looking for nominations of families in need of a helping hand on some much-needed home renovations.
And after delivering their major projects in Maple Ridge for the past couple of years, the group hopes to stay closer to its Tri-Cities home this time around.
"We had a couple of smaller projects each year in the Tri-Cities... but the best nominations in the end happened to be in Maple Ridge," said Pastor Stevan Mirkovich. "We get nominations from as far away as Minnesota, we get them from all over the Lower Mainland."
Now, Cornerstone hopes to get back to the project's original mission - to be of service to families in the Tri-Cities.
Mirkovich said the church looks for families in need, whether it's due to an illness, disability or death in the family that's keeping them from doing the renovations that are needed.
"They've fallen on harder times or they've gone through a struggle as a family and as a result the home has not been able to receive the kind of care it needs," Mirkovich said.
The Home Team's first project was for the Penner family in the fall of 2007, a little more than a year after Jesse Penner was murdered outside a Port Coquitlam house party.
More than 200 volunteers and countless businesses stepped up to the project and turned what was supposed to be a fresh coat of paint and some new gutters into a fully renovated home, inside and out.
Since then, the projects have grown, Mirkovich said, and have included everything from installing elevators to building large additions and making homes wheelchair accessible.
And every year, Mirkovich said, it's a nail-biter.
"We always bite off way more than we can chew, and then it becomes an act of faith in the community and business to step up and make it happen," he said. "There's nothing that scares us off. We get less and less scared, and more and more brave, and every year we pull something off we say, 'Wow, it's a miracle.'"
The Home Team does have a few requirements: Nominated families must be homeowners, not renters; and they can't be members of the Cornerstone Seventh Day Adventist Church (the church already has ways of helping its congregation, Mirkovich said).
For more information on how to nominate a family for the Cornerstone Home Team's next renovation project, which would likely take place from Sept. 15 to 22, visit www.cornerstonehometeam.org. Submissions are due by March 31.
