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Extreme Volunteering
Who really benefits when a reality TV show entices thousands of volunteers to build a stunning new house for a family in need?

By Virginia Stuart '75, '80G

When his wife sits down to watch ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," Ron Bauer '76 usually heads out to catch some Sunday night football with friends. As co-owner of a general contracting company, he gets his fill of building projects during the week. Besides, he's just not the type to enjoy a reality TV show filled with screaming and tears. "We're construction guys," he says of his company, Trumbull-Nelson Construction in Hanover, N.H. "We don't even like to hug."

Bauer could never have imagined himself being on the show—until he got a phone call from ABC last August. Trumbull-Nelson was being asked to perform an impossible task fit for a fairy tale: tear down a house and build a new one in its place in one week, using all volunteer labor and donated supplies. The project would benefit a local family of 10 whose mold-ridden house was particularly dangerous to their 9-year-old son, a leukemia patient. It took Bauer and co-owner Larry Ufford five minutes to say yes.

For many of today's college students, on the other hand, the thought of being on reality TV is not only imaginable, but thrilling. Last September, the 18 members of a freshman seminar on active citizenship were brainstorming ideas for public service projects when someone mentioned that "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" was coming to New Hampshire. The atmosphere in the room became electric, and everyone started talking at once. Many were familiar with the show and its host, handyman heartthrob Ty Pennington.

"I could have come in with my hoity-toity views about reality TV," says Bruce Mallory, professor of education, but instead, he and co-instructor Vilmarie Sanchez chose to harness the students' energy. It didn't really matter whether the excitement came from a desire to do good, to be on TV, or both, if it motivated the class to create its own community while examining what it means to be an active citizen.

By the time the house was completed in early October, students, contractors and professors alike caught a surprising glimpse of the reality behind a reality TV show. They learned the answers to some of the most pressing questions of our day—Is it scripted? What's real and what's fake? And they had also wrestled with a larger question: Who really benefits when a TV show convinces thousands of volunteers to build a house for one family in need?

Selected from thousands of applicants, each Extreme Makeover family is, like the Marshalls of Lyme, N.H., not only desperate but also deserving. Despite their hardships, Cameron Marshall and his family had spearheaded a fundraising effort to raise thousands of dollars for the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth, where he was treated for leukemia. After learning that his blood type was B+, Cam decided to make "Be Positive" his motto as well as the name of his fundraising organization.

The formula for the highly successful show includes a dash of home-improvement, a dose of demolition, a celebrity cameo or two, a lot of up-close-and-personal moments, and, at the end, the Big Reveal, when the family returns for the unveiling of the new home. Like a number of other reality TV shows, this one has also raised screaming for joy to the level of an Olympic sport.

As soon as Bauer and his partner had accepted ABC's invitation to orchestrate "the build" for the Marshall family, the clock started ticking. Bauer, who earned a degree in civil technology from UNH's Thompson School of Applied Science, has three decades of experience in the construction business, and Trumbull-Nelson, with about 100 employees, is used to large jobs. This one, however, was unlike any other. In addition to the construction itself, the company was responsible for soliciting, scheduling and coordinating all the donations of supplies and skilled labor, ranging from architectural design to sheetrocking. There were also thousands of unskilled volunteers and onlookers to manage.

A 30-day schedule for the project soon filled an entire wall of the company's training room, and for the construction week itself, every hour was detailed. Since the house was located on a single-lane road, deliveries had to be carefully choreographed. The pre-construction work, says Bauer, was actually more crucial than the construction. (In fact, the pre-construction was the construction for components like wall panels, which were not only prefabricated but also pre-insulated and pre-wired.)

On Sept. 28, videotaping at the site began when the Marshalls were officially informed of their good fortune with the so-called "door knock." Dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, Pennington ran up to the house with a bullhorn. With his spiky hair literally standing on end, he yelled at the top of his lungs: "Good morning, Marshall family!! Jay, Elena, kids, come on out!" The family burst out of their house, screaming and hugging every crew member in sight.

Bauer made his first videotaped appearance on Day 2, when a couple hundred volunteers in hardhats marched up the road to the Marshalls' house, led by Bauer and his partner in front of a Trumbull-Nelson banner. Tears flowed freely as the family recognized faces from the town and the hospital. Even Bauer teared up a bit as he told the family, "We've assembled a lot of good people here who can't wait to get started, and I can't wait to see the expressions on your family's faces when we finish building this beautiful home together."

Roughly chiseled and clean-cut, Bauer fit the role of white knight in hardhat perfectly. But his words came from the heart. To his surprise, none of his videotaped encounters with the celebrity hosts was scripted. And all that screaming, he's convinced, was as spontaneous as the tears. "They wanted to scream," he says.

This initial show of force by the advance troops of volunteers in hardhats is known as the Braveheart March. The allusion to epic medieval Scottish battles may seem like a stretch, and yet there was something epic about the effort that was about to begin. Ultimately, more than 2,000 volunteers would work on the home, including nearly 200 skilled tradesmen and women. Many worked normal jobs by day and volunteered at night. Some traveled from afar—one woman was on her fourth Makeover project in a row—and slept in their cars. Or not. One of Bauer's superintendents was so dedicated that he had to be ordered to go sleep; after 36 hours on the job, it just wasn't safe to keep going.

Once the family had been whisked off for a week's vacation at Disney World, it was demolition time, and M. Geoffrey Carlton II '96 of Lee, N.H., had a special role to play. Since the whole Marshall family loves extreme sports, Carlton and his team of extreme athletes, Maximum Velocity, brought in their own ramps, rails and other equipment to create a temporary skate park outside and inside the house. Then they taped a pumped-up segment for the show. Guys on BMX bikes, motocross bikes, skateboards and inline skates barreled up, down and even through the walls of the house. They flew out of windows and back-flipped over the heads of volunteers.

Then, as onlookers cheered, two backhoes bit into the roof and reduced the house to a pile of matchsticks. The contractors' first setback—putting them about six hours behind schedule—occurred when they discovered an old septic tank and contaminated soil that had to be removed.

On Day 4, the foundation was poured, and the house, with its prefab walls, went up in a matter of hours. The trick: the concrete was treated to cure rapidly and overbuilt enough to take the full weight of the house without delay. By the end of the day, the builders were back on schedule.

When the UNH students arrived on Day 5 to serve two shifts—6 p.m. to midnight and 6 a.m. to noon—they spent the first couple of hours peeling labels off donated bottled drinks. Since those brands hadn't paid for product placement, their labels must not appear on the show. This rather odd task highlighted a source of ongoing debate among the students: Was this whole extravagant effort an example of active citizenship—defined in the course as working for permanent change—or simply a lucrative and manipulative enterprise for the ABC-Disney TV conglomerate?

Alex Freid '13 was one of two students who declined to join the project. Just volunteering, he explains, "makes you feel good, but in reality all you're doing is putting a band-aid on a problem like homelessness." He doesn't begrudge a family in need, he insists: "I'm just critical of the idea of building a house as a solution to a problem."

While the others were peeling labels, four students got a different perspective as they carried a woman in a wheelchair over a bumpy path. The woman, a 40-year resident of Lyme, told them that the close-knit town hadn't been able to do enough on its own for the Marshalls. "That's when it clicked that this isn't just a reality TV show," recalls Eric Sales '13. "It's a community going out to help a family."

It was dark by the time Keli Poirier '13 and the bottle-peelers made their way to the construction site, catching flashes of garish high-intensity lighting through the trees and the harsh sound of a generator grinding away. Then the scene opened up before them: a half-built house surrounded by slick, muddy ground with people scurrying around in a cold rain. Unusually cheerful people. Poirier felt the same sense of euphoria. By midnight, she was muddy and cold. She and two friends had spent three hours screwing light bulbs into ceiling sockets—and then unscrewing them because the sockets must be insulated first. She'd gotten fiberglass in her eyes (and flushed them out). But it was all fun, even taking out the trash. "I really didn't care because I was taking out trash for a better cause," she recalls.

Despite setbacks, Bauer and Trumbull-Nelson achieved the impossible: building a house that should have taken six months in just over 106 hours. In the process, Bauer had learned a thing or two about the value of doing extensive planning for large projects and involving owners early on, and when the show was broadcast, he was pleased with the credit his company received. He's still not a hugger—though he accepted a group hug from the Marshall family in the end—and yet some of the best benefits reaped by his company have been, well, emotional.

Throughout the construction week, Bauer had witnessed an abundance of good will. "Normally you get a plumber and an electrician in the same room, and they can't agree what time of day it is, let alone what needs to be done," he says. "But they helped each other out." Likewise, he saw personality conflicts ease among his own staff. When it was over, the company didn't get back to normal; it was better than normal. These "construction guys," who would never go for a touchy-feely retreat, had—in seven days of nonstop work—experienced the ultimate team-building exercise.

As for the UNH students, they never met a star or even saw a TV camera—but in the end, it didn't matter. They, too, had bonded through the process of overcoming logistical and bureaucratic hurdles to make the trip and reveled in the camaraderie once they got there. They also achieved the academic goals of the course, which, as a freshman Inquiry seminar, helps students become "active, independent thinkers who explore subjects and ideas from a number of viewpoints" through the multidisciplinary study of a complex social issue. Although they agreed to disagree on the question of whether the project qualified as an example of active citizenship, they still heard each other out.

Mercedes Dones '13, who loves "the drama, the screaming and yelling" of reality TV, credits Freid with "opening our eyes" to a different point of view. She also noticed a disconnect between the episode and the reality she saw on the muddy ground in Lyme. "The show wasn't about the community whatsoever," she says. Freid, on the other hand, was impressed to learn that ABC had garnered tens of thousands of dollars for Be Positive.

When the students watched "their" episode of the show at instructor Vilmarie Sanchez's home in November, they squished together on sofas and the floor like old friends. They were amused to see the bulk of the construction conveyed through rapid-fire time-lapse segments: as volunteers in blue shirts and white hardhats ran jerkily about, the house seemed almost to be building itself. "They fast-forwarded over us!" someone joked. Still, they took pride in seeing the lights and kitchen counters they'd helped install. They were also moved by the Marshall family. "What we did is affecting that child and maybe saving his life," says Sales—and that's enough to qualify as "permanent change" for him.

At the climactic moment of the show, the students leaned forward. Pennington, standing with the Marshalls and a crowd behind a large bus, went into full cheerleader mode. The crowd on the TV show and students in the living room chanted with him: "Move that bus! Move that bus! Bus driver, move that bus!!" The bus wheels started to turn as if by dint of the sheer force of will of thousands of volunteers and millions of viewers around the world. The bus moved. And the family wept, screamed and hugged at the sight of their brand-new home. ~


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