Susan Fellows: Rehabbing Older Homes for Free with Project Hope

By Tom Jenz

On October 23, 2023

Headed by Executive Director Susan Fellows, Project Hope rehabilitates old houses in fading neighborhoods at no costs to qualified residents. To prove the medium really is the message, the Project Hope office is located in a recently remodeled house with interior wood paneling and a vintage decor. My grandmother could have lived there. The Project Hope house sits in the Amani neighborhood with blocks lined with other old houses 26th Street off Locust. Residents are mostly African American, and most rent their homes. There were comfortable frame houses with porches. There are sidewalks, trees, bushes and window shades. Sadly, many houses need repairs, and the area crime rate is troubling. 

Fellows greeted me at the door, and we sat at a conference table near the picture window. She is 58 and comes with vast experience in business and real estate.

I said I knew that Ezekiel CDC/Project Hope rehabs dilapidated housing in some of Milwaukee’s worst neighborhoods. This includes hands-on training to underemployed and unemployed individuals and even some who have had run-ins with the law—and then sells the rehabbed homes to first-time homebuyers. “Where is this all happening?” I asked. “What neighborhoods?”

“Right now, we are focusing in revitalizing this area, the Amani neighborhoods,” Fellows said. “It’s called the Amani Revitalization Project. We’re not purchasing houses but rather rehabbing them. We get a funding grant from the Dominican Center, and also financial help from Northwestern Mutual Insurance. We visit some of the houses in need of repair and explain to the residents that we have a grant to do repairs on their houses and put the house back into good safe living quarters. The residents need to fill out a basic form. Once that gets approved, we go into the house and do the needed repairs. This house we are now sitting in, our Project Hope office, is one that was revitalized. Community residents sometimes stop in here with questions.”

Amani is a neighborhood bounded by N. 35th St. on the west, N. 15th St. on the east, W. Capitol Drive on the north, W. North Ave. on the south. It has a high crime rate.

Business Career

Fellows was only recently named executive director, but she’s been active in the organization for years. I was interested in how she got involved in the first place. 

“It was through my church, Heritage Presbyterian Church in Muskego,” she explained. “Our members chose to sell our church building and the vacant land, and since then, all of our money goes to mission efforts, for example, $50,000 every year to Shelter Projects. Our church no longer has a building. We rent a small office space at Tudor Oaks Senior Living in Muskego, and we hold Sunday services in their community room for our members along with residents from Tudor Oaks. Anyway, our church got connected with Ezekiel Project Hope because they do job training. We provided the specialty tools kits to train people in the trades. We also got donations from other churches and worked with Electrician Jim Gaillard and Don Utech who do the training for Project Hope. Our Presbyterian Pastor Michelle Henrichs sits on the Ezekiel board and is the Treasurer. I joined the Board, and then Don asked me to be executive director.”

Don Utech is president of Ezekiel, a retired global entrepreneur who helps Ezekiel trainees and contractors. Gaillard is vice president and training manager at Ezekiel, He owns WHIRE Electric. Since 2002, he has hired and trained over 200 unemployed, underemployed, or formerly incarcerated people in the building trades.

“What about you?” I asked. “I understand you’ve spent most of your career in real estate. Tell me about your background.”

“I grew up in the city of Oak Creek,” she said. “My older sister and older brother and I graduated from Oak Creek High School. I went to college at UWM. Worked my way through college with full and part time jobs at Rocky Rococo’s restaurants on the south side. My assignment was to open up new stores. At first, I majored in accounting, but I liked working with people. I ended up with a business degree and a double major in marketing and urban development. I studied real estate and how to set up cities.”

After graduating from UWM in 1987, Fellows was hired by National Realty as a leasing agent for a 200-unit apartment building in Madison. She quickly moved up the ladder to assistant manager. When another property opened up in Racine, she moved there and worked for National Realty in management for six years. “Then, I took a leave of absence,” she said. “My partner and I backpacked Europe for four months. She had just graduated from college. We stayed in Youth Hostels. Best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

When she got back to Milwaukee, Fellows continued to work for National Realty until an unusual opportunity arose. She explained, “One weekend, my partner and I went camping up north. We stopped and ate lunch at the Pioneer Pub & Grill in Wild Rose, Wisconsin. We noticed the Pioneer was for sale. Long story short, I ended up buying the place. We moved up to Wild Rose and ran the Pioneer Pub & Grill for about six years, but it was exhausting work, but one of the best times of our lives. Finally, we sold the bar and made a pretty good profit.” 

They moved back to Milwaukee, and Fellows worked in sales in the printing business at MetaGraphics, and eventually became the Project Manager at the plant. But she missed the real estate business. “I got back into property management at Gorman & Company out of Madison,” she said. “Gorman was also doing affordable housing. I oversaw their properties in the Milwaukee area. I worked at Gorman for about six years and then got a job as Director of Property Management at Ogden Company, Wisconsin’s largest full-service real estate organization. She became Executive Vice President and worked at Ogden for 17 years, and eventually made a shift in her career to run the Residential Sales Division.”

Fellows was always a risk taker, and she struck out on her own, working out of her home as a real estate agent and a contractor for rehabbing old homes. “Some homes I bought,” she said, “and some I only rehabbed. I am still doing this job.” 

Project Hope Mission

On the Ezekiel Project Hope’s website, there is a stated mission: ‘To revitalize Milwaukee neighborhoods with the collaboration of minority firms for the purpose of creating jobs, providing training for minorities in the trades’ industry and individuals in the trades, and fostering homeownership in Milwaukee’s central city.’ I asked Fellows about the process of finding and collaborating with minority workers in the trades and also developers.

She said, “Our electrician, Jim Gaillard, grew up in this area, the Amani neighborhoods. He has good connections to some of the local minority vendors. We ask those vendors if they’d be willing to have our trainees work on their job sites. The vendors and contractors don’t have to pay the trainees. We pay them. We also pay for the classwork held right here in our office.” 

I said, “If I’m a young man or woman who wants to be an electrician, plumber or carpenter, do I call you to apply?”

“You could do that, or you might come from a referral,” Fellows said. “We also teach the trades to incarcerated people, help them develop a skill so they might have a job when they get out of jail. Some of them even get to work on the job sites.”

I told Susan Fellows it seemed that Project Hope’s goal is to find people interested in doing work in the trades, no matter what their backgrounds.

She agreed. “We work with SBC Training, a Milwaukee training school for the trades. Three or four times per year, we get a group of about 20 trainees from SBC Training. Of their 10-week training program, a week is spent in on the job training with us at Ezekiel. We also are trying to do a partnership with Milwaukee Area Technical College.”

The HOPE in Project Hope is an acronym—H for Home, O for Ownership, P for Partnership, and E for Employment. 

Fellows explained that Project Hope does not purchase privately owned houses, only rehabbing them. She added, “But we can also advise you on the process of securing a house mortgage. I will say we do purchase vacant houses in disrepair from the city for a few thousand dollars, then rehab them, and we’ve helped find qualified buyers. We would like to do much more of this.  Rehab, train, and create Home Ownership.” 

Project Hope is largely funded by nonprofit grants. She said, “We have a woman, Veronda Patton, program nanager, here who helps in finding the grants and writes the applications with the support of Kathy Gaillard, Ezekiel’s marketing consultant. For example, the Zilber Family Foundation is a big supporter of Ezekiel Project Hope. Not long ago, we received a $125,000 grant for Jim Gaillard, our vice president and electrician, to fix the electrical wiring in homes not conforming to code. But we wouldn’t be able continue our mission without the support of Northwestern Mutual. They believe in the work we are doing, that we can touch even more lives.” 

Fellows was only recently named executive director of Ezekiel CDC/Project Hope. 

“Our first goal is to enhance our Project Hope outreach so we can get more of the bigger donor dollars,” she explained. “Our belief is you need to build wealth in the neighborhood, house by house. You build wealth through training and educating people for better paying jobs, and then those people will buy homes. A neighborhood is stronger with house owners, not landlords who own rental properties.”

This piece was republished from the Shepard Express.