When you sign up for Water Street’s Loyalty Rewards, you earn three reward points for every dollar you spend at any of our café locations. These points can be redeemed for discounts, OR you can choose to donate a portion directly to our Featured Non-Profit. From July through September 2024, our Featured Non-Profit is the Community Homeworks.

Community Homeworks has a mission to empower our low income neighbors to maintain safe, sustainable, and dignified homes. Beginning back in 2009, the goal was to address an underserved community of homeowners who were facing critical health or safety issues in their homes, but due to financial reasons, physical ability, or repair skillset, were unable to fix the issues. During 2023, Community Homeworks completed a record of 125 household projects and served 233 different households. The average age of the homes in which work was completed was 96 years old investing in over $460,000 in local homes, not including in-house skilled trade labor.

Community Homeworks has a no-cost critical home repair program that serves income-qualified homeowners through remediation of critical health or safety issues. With requests for these services growing each year, this organization will continue to assist homeowners with furnaces, water heaters, electrical, plumbing, environmental remediation (such as mold or sewer back ups), accessibility (such as handrails or stair repairs) and many other repairs to stabilize the home. Not only are they providing these services to our neighbors at no-cost, they also offer an education program designed to empower participants with the hands-on knowledge and skills necessary to complete maintenance and repair projects in their homes.

Community Homeworks education and critical home repair programs help homeowners grow skills development and build equity/generational wealth. Additionally, they have an upcoming Tool Library - Launching Fall 2024! This will be available to program participants and first-time contractors to support access to the tools and materials necessary to complete home maintenance and repair projects. There are many workshops provided such as How to replace an Interior Light, Home Safety & Security, Introduction to Hand Tools, and many more listed on their website.

Water Street is proud to support the Community Homeworks and we hope that you can help us in this effort.

Supporting non-profits throughout Kalamazoo county

Water Street’s Loyalty Rewards Program began in 2018 and features a new non-profit each quarter. With the help of our customers, we've been able to give a total of $13,830 to non-profit organizations to help support the important work they do in our community.

Check out our Giving page to learn how your organization can apply to be considered as our next Loyalty Rewards Featured Non-Profit.