For homeless Eugene residents, building a brighter future is now a literal phrase.
Students from the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts along with community volunteers from Eugene’s Opportunity Village — collectively calling themselves The Common Good — have been working nearly two years to furnish and build a mobile tool shed that will help those without houses maintain their temporary dwellings and repair personal belongings.
The mobile tool shed officially opened Saturday, Sept. 13, at Opportunity Village on Garfield Street in Eugene. Among the first workshops were the basics in tent repair and bicycle maintenance.
The project was funded by a grant from the UO’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics to “examine notions of capitalism and the common good in relation to design services with and for local houseless individuals,” according to a press release from the university.
Alex Froehlich is a member of Design Bridge, a program in the architecture school that works with clients around the city on construction projects that aim to help disenfranchised members of the community. He has managed the project since its inception in 2012.
However, the mobile tool workshop project is the first of its kind. With the grant from the Wayne Morse center, The Common Good was able to forego fundraising and serve the community more directly with a project created by the program and its beneficiaries.
Froehlich said even though folks living on the street often get help with basic needs (food and water, temporary shelter, clothing, etc.) there is no opportunity for them to learn to produce a more stable environment and lifestyle for themselves.
“Dignity and respect means more than just provision of minimum physical needs,” Froehlich said. “People need space to survive and grow emotionally, a place to feed their brains and things to feel proud of. That is what ultimately led us to the mobile workplace that we ended up building.”
The exciting thing about this project, Froehlich said, is that it has the potential to keep improving as it moves locations. Although the tool shed is stationed at Opportunity Village for now, houseless individuals all over the city can benefit from its mobility.
“It was pretty incredible when you’d talk to an unhoused person and you could see the gratefulness in their eyes because nobody had ever asked them, ‘What do you think we should build?’” he said. “This project was an opportunity for their own creativity to affect the course of their own lives, and it felt special to be a part of that.”
—By Nathaniel Brown, Public Affairs Communications intern