In April, the US raised a national challenge to house 38,000 actively homeless Veterans during calendar year 2022.  

Veteran homelessness inspires action in us all — including our nation’s youth. Students at Summer Creek High School studying architecture and engineering are putting their skills to work, building homes for Veterans in need. In September, Gateway Logistics Group aided the students in the Principles of Architecture & Construction class in this endeavor.

With the help of their instructor, James Gaylord, Summer Creek kids are achieving remarkable feats of community service, and at an early age. As a part of the Big Heroes, Tiny Homes program, these enterprising students take all the steps to design tiny homes, acquire material, and eventually construct them by their own hands. Other incredible organizations like the Lowes Foundation have made this program possible by donating construction materials as well as appliances and furnishings for the homes.

In July 2022, Gateway Leadership read an article about this program, and reached out to see if we could assist with the logistics of transporting a prebuilt home. It turned out that the home the Summer Creek students built the year prior had been moved at an extortionate cost, nearly 3 times higher than it should have been, even for oversized cargo as complicated as this. Gateway offered to transport the house pro bono, in support of such a good cause. We worked in collaboration with The Sipe Boys housing movers agreed to provide services to Gateway at a reduced rate to facilitate the transport of this oversized load to its destination.

The Big Heroes, Tiny Homes program is a student-community collaborative project, offered by Summer Creek and Kingwood Park High Schools in Humble ISD. Teams of students designed, engineered and built each home with strict guidelines and exceptional quality control, working with local architects, engineers, and other community partners to audit their completed construction. The schools will be designing and building homes on each campus to create student-stocked tiny home communities for homeless veterans in the Houston area. By forming partnerships with non-profits, private individuals, and businesses in their communities like Gateway, they aim to provide a sense of community and safety to our nation’s heroes as well as inspiring similar projects to take place across our nation. 

“I was particularly affected by how committed all the students were to this endeavor,” one Gateway employee said shortly after moving day. “They all came out of other classes multiple times to learn how the house would be moved, watched it get loaded,” and “were so proud of their work.”

Gateway had an incredible time working with this fabulous group of students and instructors, and we look forward to continued collaboration with these organizations in the future.