Teens With Tools Make a Difference

Jonah Lehrer put down his paint roller and wiped the sweat off his brow. With his solid oak Vaughn hammer swinging from a tool belt wrapped around his hips, the slightly built teenager descended the stairs of the two-story house he was painting and walked the short distance to an identically designed house around the corner.

Like a tailor showing off the perfect stitching on a new suit, the 18-year-old North Hollywood student pointed out the fine carpentry and neat paint job on the three-bedroom house he helped build for Habitat for Humanity last summer in Watts.

The rose bushes lining the walkway to the two-story home were, he explained, cultivated at North Hollywood High School. When the bushes were firmly established, the volunteer transplanted them to the garden that frames the 1,200-square-foot house off East 96th Street.

“The roses are a metaphor for what we did here,” the Columbia University-bound student said. “We started from scratch, just a dry, empty lot, then poured the foundation, raised the walls and put up the siding.”

The house, on which he and a crew of 100 students began work last June, was completed in September. Lehrer takes special pride in its construction as the first house financed and built through his efforts as co-creator of Habitat for Humanity’s High School Initiative.

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The nonprofit organization was established by Lehrer and his best friend, Eliot Abel, a recent graduate of Oakwood High School in North Hollywood. The pair, who were impressed with Habitat for Humanity’s program that provides low-cost houses to families who are unable to qualify for home loans, wanted to establish a lasting community-service program that would involve students.

“I’d been on one Habitat for Humanity site for a day, and I was sold,” Lehrer said. “I love that people who have never hit a nail before are suddenly raising walls. It struck me as a fantastic idea.”

So the teenagers sent a prospectus to Community Partners, a nonprofit organization that provides financial, legal and administrative assistance to fledgling nonprofit groups. With the group’s help, the High School Initiative was launched.

The students then brought volunteers from six local high schools into the project, for which they raised more than $100,000. Habitat for Humanity-Los Angeles found a family and a site for the students’ first effort.

“Jonah is a socially conscious young man who is trying to make a difference in his community,” said Steve Sines, Habitat’s project manager for the 26 houses under construction on 96th Street. “He’s stepping up and being a leader, which says a lot about him.”

Lehrer, whose High School Initiative recently built a house in Panorama City and is helping construct a second 96th Street home, said the sore muscles and calluses he’s developed are a small price to pay for the satisfaction he has derived.

“It was very moving when we handed over the keys to the new homeowners,” said the honors science student, a recent recipient of a 1999 Volunteer Center/J.C. Penney Golden Rule Award. “I cried. The emotion shocked me.”

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With the High School Initiative now firmly established here, Lehrer said he will pour his efforts into new community-service projects in New York.

“The [Habitat for Humanity] project made me a better human being,” Lehrer said. “What I got out of it is intangible--the compassion, the understanding. I walked away a richer person.”