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Making a Difference: Spark a Change providing homes, new hope for families in Mexico

By Darrel Hammon - Special to the Daily Herald | Jan 11, 2025
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Spark a Change volunteers and a family gather in the family's new home.
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Spark a Change volunteers work on a new home in Mexico.
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A new home built by Spark a Change volunteers in Mexico.
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Spark a Change volunteers.
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Spark a Change volunteers work on a new home in Mexico.
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Spark a Change volunteers and a family gather in the family's new home.
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A new home built by Spark a Change volunteers in Mexico.
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Darrel L. Hammon

Kelly and Mike McMullin and their four boys have savored carne asada and an assortment of Mexican cuisine items during their past 16 Thanksgivings, which were celebrated in Mexico while they were doing humanitarian work.

Kelly’s cousin and his wife approached her about building homes with a nonprofit. She had served a church mission in Costa Rica and loved Spanish and the culture, but she was a bit skittish about going to Mexico, especially with her four children who were ages 6, 8, 10 and 12 at the time. Yet, they went.

“I wanted to teach my city-raised boys how to serve and take the ‘I want’ out of their vocabulary and see real needs in the world,” Kelly said. “I have lived and traveled in many different places and wanted to serve more and do more.”

After many years of building homes with another nonprofit in communities around Tijuana, the trips got bigger and bigger, and Kelly decided to begin her own nonprofit to continue to build homes, work with orphanages and do other humanitarian projects. This was a longtime goal of many, including Dean Peterson and Jamie Christensen and their families, who had been participating in this work for years.

“I just wanted to do something and looked for a name that meant something different,” she said. “The phrase ‘spark a change’ elicits the feeling to pay it forward, do something, sparking a change wherever you are as we build, teach, serve and love. Thus, we named our new nonprofit Spark a Change and continued work in a suburb of Tijuana.”

Most Spark a Change homes average 900 square feet with two or three bedrooms, depending on the family lot and the dynamics of the family.

The overall planning process requires a pre-trip that helps identify possible projects and facilitates the ordering of materials from local vendors. A letter is then sent out to those who have participated in the past and others who have requested to be on the distribution list. “Once we know how many people are going, we can determine how many projects we can do,” Kelly said.

A cement slab is completed for each home before the volunteers arrive. A local contact coordinates the pouring of those concrete pads as well as arranges for all the construction materials to be delivered to the sites just before work starts. Each home averages 18 to 20 workers during the week of construction.

On Friday or Saturday before Thanksgiving, most of the volunteers drive from Utah to Tijuana to be ready for a Monday start. “We visit a local church and orphanage on Sunday, have our group Thanksgiving dinner, discuss the week ahead, reacquaint ourselves with those who came last year, and meet the new volunteers,” Kelly said.

Come Monday morning, they launch into the building projects and work long hours each day to complete as much as possible by Friday evening.

“One of the fun things we do each night is eat amazing food and share with the group the successes of the day,” Kelly said. “We then visit and play games for a few hours before we all head to bed, most of us exhausted. By the end of the week, it’s wonderful to see how much of a family we have become!”

Serving a local orphanage is a group favorite, particularly with the children. “While we are there, we visit an orphanage, play games, cook a meal,” Kelly said. “We also complete a project while we are there.”

Spark a Change also provides classes for the local women. One recent project was sewing a personal thermal-cooker project called a “Hope Sac,” which allows families to cook portions of their meal and then place them in the Hope Sac to keep them cooking, thus eliminating the use of electricity to keep things cooking.

Spark a Change is all about volunteers learning to build things and serving. The volunteers are mostly attracted to the project through word of mouth. Past participants invite others the next year. The core group grows each year as many people love to serve and enjoy the experience of serving and meeting new people. One such volunteer family is the Jason and Mary Scarbrough family.

A general contractor, Jason loves his traditional Thanksgiving so much that he didn’t initially take seriously a friend’s invitation to go to Mexico and build houses during the same time. A couple of years later, they were renewing their passports and decided to go. “We have been hooked ever since,” Jason said. “My wife Mary, two sons and a daughter have been involved for eight years.”

Another core family is the Ashley and Josh Black family. Ashley’s mom and dad, Barry and Teresa Bickmore, had been going to Mexico and helping build homes for 10 years and invited their family. “My dad thought our family would really enjoy this,” Ashley said. “So, now after four years going each Thanksgiving, our kids request to go each year, and it has become a family affair.”

Funding buildings is expensive. Each home costs between $15,000 and $20,000 to build, depending on its size and the number of rooms a family requires. Each year, all volunteers work hard to collect donations. “All donations go 100% towards the building and humanitarian projects,” Kelly said. “The volunteers pay participation fees that cover all their trip expenses with a portion going towards the construction costs.”

Spark a Change is making a difference one home and one family at a time. They believe they are helping, even in just a small way, to give a few families the ability to not worry about shelter. These families feel extremely blessed and grateful.

“I was blessed with the construction of my house, which, for us, is a home which we needed very much,” said Pilar, a mother, grandmother, and home recipient. “We live with my son, his wife and three children, two of them with autism. Because my husband is sick and needs dialysis every four hours, I have no job. After paying for food and rent, my son has nothing left. When they built us a house, our situation changed. We will always be grateful!”

“Once they have shelter, they can concentrate on all the other needs and do more to become more self-sufficient and can pay it forward,” Kelly said.

The volunteers do not do everything on the trip. The local families do some of the finishing touches on the homes like taping the drywall and painting. “We leave them a little to do so they will be invested in the home,” Kelly said.

An amazing thing happens on the trip with the volunteers: they become more than just friends for a week. “When you serve and work together for a week, you become family, a different type of family,” Kelly said. “Your friendships become strong bonds. It is an incredible thing.”

The future of Spark a Change is vibrant and bright. They hope to continue their humanitarian service and add more trips to be able to serve more families in many communities. Their biggest challenge will always be building capacity within the organization – finding funding to do all the projects they want to build.

Spark a Change has changed Kelly and her family. “These past 16 years have been amazing and helped us become part of who we are. My children were so young when they began going to Mexico for Thanksgiving, they don’t know anything different than having carne asada for Thanksgiving,” Kelly said. “These trips also make a huge difference in the lives of the volunteers. We come away with more than we give. We learn so much from the humility and attitude of the people we are serving, we go home better people for having served.”

Kelly’s message to anyone is poignant: “You don’t have to spend a lot of money or go on a big humanitarian trip to make a difference,” she said. “You can Spark a Change anywhere, anytime for anyone! When you hand over the house to the people, you realize we changed their entire lives. Now, they can keep living and creating a better life for themselves. It cannot be better than that.”

To connect with or donate to Spark a Change, send a message to sparkachange5@gmail.com, go to sparkachange.org or connect on Instagram @sparkachange5.