Crafting Community

The Prairie Ridge campus is home to many active resident groups, including the Handy Residents' Club. You can often find them in the workshops located in the garage levels of Pioneer Prairie and Settlers Ridge apartment buildings. The club consists of approximately 40 members with varying levels of involvement. Their monthly meetings focus mostly on current projects, status updates, and upcoming projects. Handy Residents' Club members can often be found around campus changing light bulbs for fellow residents, assembling and repairing furniture, or woodworking. They also educate one another about important safety precautions with safety videos and the Handy Residents' Handbook.

Starting from Scratch

When resident Garth Stroble, Chairman of the Handy Residents' Club, joined three years ago, he had never done any woodworking. He was familiar with the workshops on campus, as he would often visit his mother-in-law, a previous resident of the campus.

Shortly after moving into Oakwood, he spotted a familiar face in the workshop one day as he was passing by — it was one of his neighbors down the hall, Lynn Schwantes.

Curious about how the wood lathe in the workshop operated, Garth learned about the craft of woodturning from Lynn. Not long after, Garth attended a week-long camp in North Carolina to further indulge in this newfound hobby.

Since then, Garth has continued to pursue woodworking as a hobby and has made countless wooden bowls. Garth and Lynn also use this as a way to give back to the Oakwood community by donating some of their wooden bowls to the Oakwood Foundation. The Foundation has in turn gifted the bowls to thank Oakwood’s Golden Oak Society donors for their generosity.

In addition, Garth and Lynn have also donated a portion of profits from selling their other wooden bowls back to various parts of the Oakwood community.

Leaving a Positive Impact on the Oakwood Community

Not only does the Handy Residents' Club positively impact residents on a day-to-day basis by helping change light bulbs and fix furniture, but they have also worked on a lot of collective projects for the Oakwood community. Garth recalls how 10–12 members from Handy Residents' Club helped to build the campus’ new garden solarium in just two days.

Club members also worked with the Green Committee on a recent project. The Green Committee had been working with Oakwood management to replace light fixtures on campus with more environmentally friendly ones. The Handy Residents' Club took apart the old light fixtures, separated them by the materials they were made of, and recycled or reused them accordingly. A current project for the Handy Residents Club is to build a large cabinet structure outside The Hive Bistro on campus. The cabinet will allow for multiple bins to be placed together in an attractive vessel for different types of waste collection, thus reducing the need for multiple bins to be placed in the area.