fundraiser tickets or making a donation can contact Elizabeth Triggs at (716) 430-6169 or Justin Imiola at (716) 830-4441. Those interested in volunteering can also get in touch with them to get started on a project.
Anyone who has met Elizabeth Triggs, founder of None Like You, We Care Outreach, will likely tell you the woman is a force to be reckoned with. Triggs has dedicated the last twenty years to improving life for members of the East Side community. And when she told me that she’s been “slowing down” lately, I had a hard time believing her.
Triggs started her organization back in 1992 to help members of her community get the resources they needed. “We got the idea from working with a lot of agencies and they had so much red tape–you had to wait for this person and that person,” she said. “We would do the legwork first and we would get services for people, rather than bring them in and get their hopes up and let them down.”
None Like You, We Care offers many types of assistance, from education programs, to financial assistance and opportunities to do volunteer work. “We help people with any type of problem,” Triggs said. “We’re helping with employment, getting their GED, afterschool programs, donating food, helping with heating bills. We help people who have problems with drugs and alcohol, get them straight with their family. We’re a safe haven for people with family problems. And we help people looking for community service, summer youth programs, and getting youth summer employment with the city.”
On top of all that, Triggs and her crew of volunteers established a block club to help spruce up the neighborhood and reclaim houses slated for demolition. “We want to make people aware that we don’t have to tear houses down,” she said. “It’s really a big problem with the environmental aspect when the contamination goes into the air, and people not telling us when they’re doing the teardowns.” They’ve claimed three houses thus far, located at 595 Sycamore, 276 Southampton, and 245 Southampton, and are helping restore a home at 425 Norma Place with their partners at the Lutheran Church.
Each house needed total remodeling and the hands of many volunteers. “We’re taking plaster off the wall, stripping walls down, taking lead paint out and re-painting outside,” she said. “The houses also needed new light fixtures, new electrical, new plumbing, new heating, new flooring–the whole nine yards. We’ve also put in a new handicap access deck on a house on Southampton.”
“We have to make people realize that we in the community have to take back the neighborhood, we can’t depend on the city,” Triggs said. “People have to recognize that it takes the community to stand up for what they want, and we’re not having it.”
Since 2003, the organization has also planted 15 community gardens, starting with a handful on Sycamore Street. “We wanted to do something with the empty lots, they were so filthy and dirty,” Triggs said. “We’d wake up in the middle of the night and see people had dumped things on them. We got tired of seeing the high weeds, it was just gross. People would say ‘I don’t want to go over there, it’s so nasty, so dirty.’ And we wanted to pick a place where people would have to notice us, and people would pull over because they wouldn’t believe there was actually a gazebo and a garden going up on Sycamore.”
Now the group has gardens throughout the East Side, including the Willie Canty Garden Walk at their headquarters at 595 Sycamore, several other gardens and a gazebo on Sycamore, one at Paderewski and Memorial Drive, and several at the George K. Arthur Community Center on Genessee Street. “We wanted to change the way people view our community, how people think about keeping the community clean, and how people passing through would view the community,” Triggs said. “And the community is noticing.”
Triggs relies completely on the help of volunteers to get things done. “I started with about 50 people, now I have 161,” she said. “Everyone is a volunteer and they’re from all over. You don’t necessarily need a skill, most of the people don’t have any skills. All you have to do is have a mindset to work and we learn together.”
“I think I just lost my mind,” Triggs laughed, when I asked her what keeps her doing this work every day. “I want a better neighborhood. Everybody says this is the ‘hood.’ I always remind them this is a neighborhood, I have neighbors. I know my neighbors, I talk to my neighbors, and they talk to me. I don’t know where the ‘hood’ is that they’re talking about, but this is not it.”
To keep the momentum going for spring and summer projects, None Like You, We Care will be hosting several fundraisers at local colleges starting this week. On Wednesday, April 24 they will be hosting a “Spring to Life” event from noon to 2 p.m. at the student union at Daemen College. On Thursday, April 25 they will host a second fundraiser at the UB Amherst campus in the student union from 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Both events will feature a Chinese auction and 50/50 raffle. Tickets are 5 for $5, 10 for $10, or an arm’s length for $20.
On June 26, in honor of Triggs’ birthday, the organization will host its big annual fundraiser at 276 Southampton from noon to 8:30 p.m. “We’ll have meals all day long and they can view what we’ve done, tour the houses, and someone will take them to tour the gardens,” Triggs said. All proceeds from the fundraisers go toward the organization’s work on the houses and community gardens.
Anyone interested in purchasing
fundraiser tickets or making a donation can contact Elizabeth Triggs at (716) 430-6169 or Justin Imiola at (716) 830-4441. Those interested in volunteering can also get in touch with them to get started on a project.
fundraiser tickets or making a donation can contact Elizabeth Triggs at (716) 430-6169 or Justin Imiola at (716) 830-4441. Those interested in volunteering can also get in touch with them to get started on a project.