Helping Our Neighbors with Housing

An Interview with Neil Trueblood on Gwynedd Meeting’s Avalon House

Friends Journal interviewed Neil Trueblood, a member of Gwynedd (Pa.) Meeting who serves on the meeting’s Property Committee. He discussed Avalon House, a home with six bedrooms, each of which the meeting rents at affordable rates to people at risk of homelessness or otherwise facing financial difficulties. The rooms rent for $400 to $600 per month, which includes utilities, trash, and Wi-Fi. The market rent for similar rooms would be about $1,000 plus utilities.

Gwynedd Meeting acquired the property about 25 years ago, after it had been for sale and slated for development of at least seven houses. Algernon Jenkins (1816–1890), a member of Gwynedd Meeting, built the stone house for his only child, Howard M. Jenkins, and Howard’s family so they could live nearby. Howard named it Avalon. The date stone reads 1885. (Beginning in the late 1870s, Howard served as editor-in-chief of one of Friends Journal’s predecessors, Friends Intelligencer, a position he held until his death in 1902.)

After two other intervening owners, in 2001, the meeting purchased the seven-and-a-half-acre property, which listed for approximately $800,000, with a loan from the John Barnes Trust at Abington (Pa.) Meeting. Members of the Hilltop Committee, a subcommittee of Gwynedd Meeting’s Property Committee, manage the property.

The interview has been lightly edited.

Sharlee DiMenichi: How do you find residents for Avalon House?

Neil Trueblood: Twenty-five years after starting it, we’ve fairly consistently had a full house. When there’s one or two rooms open, we put feelers out through the meeting and through Abington Quarterly Meeting. Foulkeways Quaker retirement community is across the way. On occasion, there are employees there who are in need. Right now two of the residents are Foulkeways employees. That is really great for everybody because they can walk to work. Sometimes we’ve reached out and had connections with Manna on Main Street, which is an entity that addresses hunger up in Lansdale [about four miles away]. They, too, are about helping those who need help. They may be homeless, or they may be temporarily out of work.

The people who live in Avalon House have to have a job or an obvious means of income, whether that’s disability or some other form of income, so that they can pay the rent.

SD: Were Gwynedd Friends specifically concerned about homelessness? What was the thinking behind addressing people with particular financial needs?

NT: I think there’s a general concern for homelessness that Quakers all share. There were two or three people known to the meeting who needed that help with housing. We didn’t have to work too hard at figuring out a need and a use for the building. It was carefully considered how we would operate the house. We wrote up an outline of guidelines people had to pay attention to.

I spent my career doing building and developing work, and I knew it was really important to try to save that ground. Part of my motive was to secure this open space next to the meeting. We really saw a need for financially challenged people who just didn’t have another place to go.

We never knew that we would be in the social services business, but it comes hand in hand with trying to help those folks who have been down on their luck or had some problem where they were without funds and without options.

SD: Which Quaker values motivate you to serve on this committee, and which spiritual practices sustain you in your service?

NT: Well, I’ve been a lifelong member of Gwynedd Friends Meeting. I love the philosophy of Quakerism. We all need to do whatever little we can to help society. We know there’s that of God in everyone. These folks who are challenged for whatever reason, they still have something to contribute and are interesting people and ought to be given an opportunity. I think we approach each personal challenge as somebody who needs help rather than somebody who needs discipline.

As a community, if we all do something, it just makes it all work. It’s easy to do nothing. It’s easy to argue against any kind of program. It does take work, attention, and humility to do something. The people who live in the house have a different frame of reference, and so they may not take care of things like I would, but that doesn’t make them bad people. It’s just a different point of view. We have to try to help them be good group housing members.

I also care greatly about how land gets used and cared for. We now have a fairly substantial garden on the property that the meeting uses, but it’s primarily used by Gwynedd Friends School and the kids. There’s a caretaker who’s a gardening specialist who gives gardening lessons to the kids. We took a part of the field that my dad built and turned it into a garden. We all have a responsibility to keep the good things going.

So my father was a very active member of the meeting and built a lot of things like walkways. He was on the Property Committee for decades as well. My mother cared a lot about aesthetics so she worked on the meetinghouse, doing different things. Maintaining the property is a family tradition. I come from a long line of Quakers, dating back to the 1700s when my forebears landed in North Carolina. The tradition lives in me. The religious experience of a community that comes together in the manner of Friends is really inspiring. It relies on everybody pitching in. It does not default to a pastor. It takes people stepping up and doing things. And so in that tradition, I felt compelled to participate.