Names like Grohe, Kohler and Bigelow generally are associated with new homes and luxurious kitchens and baths, but through a creative nonprofit born on the West Side of Chicago, these companies and others in the homebuilding industry have become major suppliers to groups creating and rehabbing housing for low-income residents.
The vision behind The Storehouse of World Vision, 5001 W. Harrison St., was born in the early ’90s when homebuilder Perry Bigelow began thinking about ways to use leftover materials.
“As a contractor, there were jobs where he had excess inventory,” said Amber Johnson, a marketing manager for World Vision. “He had garages full of product leftover, and that was the generator.”
A feasibility study was done to see if local nonprofit housing groups would use the services of another nonprofit that provided them with overstocked or leftover building materials. The results were positive and Bigelow pursued the idea along with Bud Ipema, of the Mid-America Leadership Foundation; Steve Haas, of Willow Creek Community Church; and Mike Mantel, of international nonprofit World Vision.
In 1995, the Building Materials Distribution Center was established in a facility on the West Side, and was off to a rocky start.
“We opened up with a hope and a prayer, and for one year, we had no traffic, but we were getting stuff donated,” said Ivan Gonzalez, general manager of The Storehouse. Gradually, users started to trickle into the warehouse and within six years, the nonprofit had become self-sustaining.
Today, The Storehouse is run by World Vision, a faith-based group known best for its work in the Third World, in a larger 40,000-square-foot warehouse at 5001 W. Harrison St. The Storehouse has 1,700 nonprofit members who pay a small annual fee and over the last decade, nonprofit groups sponsored around 7,000 low-income users for individual memberships.
After paying the annual membership fee ($5 for individuals, $25 to $125 for groups), Storehouse customers pay a cost-recovery fee that on average is about 22 percent of the retail cost of materials. A solid-core door that costs $200 at Home Depot might run $40 at The Storehouse.
In addition to doors, members can browse aisle after aisle of materials, from bathtubs to paint to cabinets. The warehouse is organized much like a Home Depot or Handy Andy, except that the usual giant aisle banners feature photos of the disadvantaged children and their parents that the group strives to help throughout the world.
Builders like Bigelow and major manufacturers from DuPont to Kohler donate discontinued or overstocked items to the tune of $25 million a year. In a novel program that started last year, DuPont also organized 400 or so of its fabricators to devote one day to making uniform Corian countertops specially for The Storehouse. Since each fabricator produced 10 to 30 countertops, The Storehouse had a year’s supply in one day.
Another section of the Storehouse provides teachers at low-income schools with supplies ranging from erasers to glitter, and its Family Fundamentals program procures shoes, clothes, hygienic items and more for families in need.
From Chicago, The Storehouse concept spread, and World Vision now runs 11 such facilities. The group is hoping to open three more centers in the area, in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood, suburban Elgin and Gary, IN.
The Storehouse only accepts donations of new materials and since staff is limited (one driver, one truck), help with getting materials to the warehouse is always appreciated, according to Johnson.