Spencer, IA – SYP – June 7-13, 2026

The Spencer, Iowa SYP project opened the week of June 7-12 with leadership volunteers from Idaho, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Indiana, year-long volunteer crew leaders from Alaska and Germany, and an additional crew leader from Minnesota.  Weekly volunteers were ten young women from Shippensburg, PA, a family group of four from Kansas, and two men from Colorado.

The Spencer project is in response to flooding of the Little Sioux River that occurred in June, 2024, with extensive damage to hundreds of homes and other buildings, including the Grace Methodist Church, where the MDS unit is hosted, which had 8 feet of water in its basement. The host church has been very welcoming, allowing MDS to use its two kitchens for meal preparation and  its entire 2^nd floor for serving meals and for volunteer housing.  The local Clay County long-term recovery organization has vetted and prioritized the jobs on which MDS is focusing and has worked closely and helpfully with us.

This first week, one MDS volunteer crew started work on a new home where contracted workers had completed the foundation.  Volunteers set joists, finished the deck and set up two of the outer walls.  Two other volunteer crews worked on 5 repair sites, mostly hanging and finishing drywall, painting, and preparing concrete floors for painting or new flooring.  In addition to these six initial work sites, six additional job cards have been signed.

On Wednesday evening, the owner of one of the homes where volunteers have been working joined us for the evening meal and told her story of watching the water quickly rise to fill her basement while family members who were trying to help had difficulty reaching her because of flooded roads.  Family who finally arrived from out of town helped remove old water-logged drywall and debris from the basement, but much work remained to be done.  She contacted the local long-term recovery group, and now nearly two years later, MDS volunteers are hanging  and finishing new drywall in basement bedrooms and getting the space ready for her to use again.

Evenings at the MDS base location were filled with games and especially with music, often led by the Woelk family volunteers from Kansas with guitars and banjo, supplemented with accordion by the Shippensburg volunteers, with many voices joining in and lots of laughter, too.  New relationships were built across diverse locations and background experiences, and several weekly volunteers said they wished they could stay another week – maybe some long-termers in the making!