Community volunteers help Finley family of five build home
JACKSON, Miss. – “I have
a dream,” said Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous 1963 speech. Each January,
we honor King and his dream of a better world with a national day of service.
For employees of Entergy
Mississippi, Entergy Nuclear, Irby Company and Mint and Julep restaurants;
students from Mississippi College School of Law and Boy Scout Troop 1 that means
helping the Finley family pursue the American dream of home ownership.
“Takashika Finley is a
mother of three children ages 12 and under, and caretaker of her mother,” said
Liz Brister, external affairs manager for Entergy Mississippi, Inc. “She and her
family were renting a home, but high crime and poor living conditions made her
fearful for her family’s safety and health.
“To get them out of the
situation, Finley moved them in with her sister in a three-bedroom, one-bath
house with 15 other family members,” she said. “To say it’s a crowded living
situation is an understatement!”
Entergy and Irby
employees and the students will honor King’s legacy by helping the Finley family
and Habitat for Humanity/Metro Jackson, Inc. build a three-bedroom, two-bath
house on Garden Circle in Jackson. Mint Restaurant employees will keep the
hard-working volunteers well fed. The Boy Scouts will do their part by keeping
it green—they will help workers properly sort waste, keep the site clean and
take trash to the recycling center at the end of the day. Volunteers will work
Friday and Saturday, January 13 and 14; Monday, January 16, which is MLK Day,
and Friday and Saturday, January 20 and 21.
“Entergy employees have
a long relationship with Habitat for Humanity,” said Brister. “Our employees
really love the sense of community created by these builds, and everyone enjoys
the immediate satisfaction of seeing a house quickly rise from the build site.”
“We’re especially glad
to have so many partners working with us, and hope this will be the first
project of many where we volunteer together,” she added.
Habitat homes are not
free. Families must provide 250 hours of sweat equity and assume a zero-interest
mortgage loan. Finley, a Comcast employee, will be working alongside the
volunteers to complete the home for her, her mother, Aletoca; 12-year-old
Tysheana, 10-year-old Quavion and four-year-old LaQuarrious.
“I’m very excited about
having my kids under one roof in a permanent, stable place where I can raise
them according to my values,” said Finley. “This home will be affordable, too,
which means I’ll have money left to meet my family’s other needs.”
“My kids ask me every
night when we’re going to start building our house, and I tell them, ‘On Friday,
January 13. That may not be the luckiest day, but it’s a good day for us’,” she
said. “We are all ready to move!”
Entergy Mississippi,
Inc. provides electricity to more than 435,000 customers in 45 counties. It is a
subsidiary of Entergy Corporation. Entergy is an integrated energy company
engaged primarily in electric power production and retail distribution
operations. Entergy owns and operates power plants with approximately 30,000
megawatts of electric generating capacity, and it is the second-largest nuclear
generator in the United States. Entergy delivers electricity to 2.7 million
utility customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
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entergy-mississippi.com
Twitter: @EntergyMS
