Matthew Wentworth, '11
Getting to know the statistics behind building an affordable house
October 19, 2009
Matthew Wentworth, '11, followed an unusual path to civic engagement. The president of the University of Richmond's chapter of Habitat for Humanity credited his involvement with affordable-housing advocacy in large part to a statistics course he took the fall of his sophomore year.
The son of a builder and a real-estate agent, Wentworth joined the UR Chapter of Habitat as a first-year student in fall 2007. He participated in several Habitat initiatives before the chapter fell into a period of inactivity in spring 2008.
But Wentworth, a management major, connected to housing issues again when he enrolled in Lewis Litteral's introductory statistics course. Litteral divided his students into groups charged with doing statistical analysis for local nonprofits.
Wentworth and two classmates spent countless hours collecting and analyzing data for ElderHomes, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the housing and living conditions of elderly, disabled and low-income people in central Virginia.
Because he was undertaking this project for an actual organization, Wentworth felt a tremendous sense of responsibility. "We needed to be accountable for this data," he said. "We needed to get it right."
And that's the point, according to Litteral. In addition to assigning students statistical exercises out of a textbook, Litteral wanted students to experience the frustrations and rewards of working with real-life statistical data.
"They begin to understand the issues involved with working with data," Litteral explained. "Sometimes data is incomplete, inaccurate, hard to find, in the wrong format or hard to input." And students learn to cope with that.
"When they deal with community organizations," Litteral said, "they also get to see the fruits of their labor."
ElderHome's mission to help people remain in their homes for as long as possible, an idea that resonated with Wentworth on a personal level.
Wentworth’s grandmother loved hosting bridge club in her historic 1865 home, he explained. But a few years ago she discontinued these get-togethers because two of her elderly friends could no longer climb the two steps to her front door. His father solved the problem by installing railings on either side of the steps. Bridge club resumed, much to his grandmother’s delight.
"I realized how much trouble my grandmother would be in if she didn't have all her kids to help her," Wentworth said. ElderHomes fills the gap for many elderly and disabled individuals who don’t have family or the financial resources to support them.
Wentworth's work with ElderHomes rekindled his interest in Habitat. He set about resurrecting the campus chapter in October 2008. He recruited 25 members, and in November 2008 was elected chapter president.
Wentworth's decision to re-engage with Habitat pleased Litteral. "My classes have an upside reward potential they never had before I started incorporating community-based learning into the curriculum," Litteral said.
The Bonner Center for Civic Engagement offers many resources to assist faculty members interested in creating a CBL course, Litteral said. For example, he participated in a CBL faculty-learning community coordinated by the CCE.
The CCE also provides students with resources, such as the student-programming grant it awarded to the UR chapter of Habitat to host an affordable-housing forum this past spring.
The chapter will sponsor more educational programming in the coming year as well as hands-on opportunities at local Habitat build sites, Wentworth said. And it will ramp up its fundraising efforts with the goal of undertaking a UR chapter-sponsored build in the near future.
Article ID: 43
