A Conversation With ... Kirk Hewitt

It’s the nonprofit arm of the Greater Springfield Board of Realtors. We help people who own their own homes to be able to stay there. Our typical recipient is making $700 a month, max. Elderly or disabled people are the bulk of our referrals from the Division of Aging and Council of Churches of the Ozarks. Officers are elected yearly, and we’re always looking for volunteers.

Why was the organization started?

We used to spend one or two board of directors meetings a year trying to figure out which charitable donations (GSBOR) was going to make. When I was president of the Board of Realtors in 1993, I saw a lot of fragmentation of where we were going with our money as far as donation requests. Ozark Area Community Action Corp. came to us, and their funding was being cut back, and they volunteered to administer (a nonprofit) if we would raise some money to help people who owned their homes. Three or four years ago, OACAC’s budget got cut back, and they couldn’t afford to administer it anymore. So we got hooked up with Council of Churches of the Ozarks’ Connections Handyman Service.

How is money raised?

We hold an annual auction, in October, generally. We’ve been doing an auction for 14 years, but the organization was started a couple years prior to that. We raised a little more than $10,000 this year at the auction. We apply for community development block grants, and also the Bentley and Musgrave trusts help us. CDBG and other grant money usually has to (be used) in a particular part of town or county. We’ve done a loft walk downtown, … we did a fundraiser (with) Springfield Cardinals. There’s something going on all the time. The money that we raise isn’t as government-related, and sometimes you need that … for administrative costs.

What kinds of projects does the money help pay for?

We look at projects that will help (people) stay in their houses. If the hot water heater goes out, or the furnace, we can help. We’ve done roof repairs. We don’t do whole roofs very often, because they just chew up so much money. Maybe there’s a porch where the floor had rotted out because the roof leaks. We’ll patch the roof and fix the floor. One time, we repaired basement stairs that had collapsed, so (the homeowner) could at least get down there to light a pilot to check on things. We’ve helped with grab bars and things like that. Sometimes it’s just little, simple things, like painting, deep cleaning and clearing debris.

What’s one of the most unusual projects the organization has funded in the last couple of years?

We put indoor plumbing in a house for a man who lives in city of Springfield and did not have indoor plumbing. We had to work with the city to get a grant to hook onto the sewer. He had a water meter and freezeless faucet on his front porch and he had an outhouse.

What’s your history in the real estate field?

I graduated from Missouri State University with a real estate finance (degree) in 1979. I technically started selling real estate in 1978 for Dorrell T. Hanks, the biggest company in town at time. The interest rate went to 11 and seven-eighths percent, and in the 1980s, they went even higher, so I got off to a pretty rough start. Things kind of turned around in the mid-1980s. I went to work for Coldwell Banker in 1984. I helped manage the Coldwell Banker office from 1987 to 1992. Then I got out of management and went back to selling, and I’ve been selling ever since. I do mostly residential. My wife, Barbara, joined me (in the business) in 1985, and we have one full-time assistant, Susan Richardson, who’s been with us for a year and a half.

You mentioned your wife, Barbara. Tell us about the rest of your family.

We’ve got an 18-year-old son, Tucker, who’s a senior at Kickapoo – he’s into cross-country big time – and a 13-year-old daughter, Hailey. She’s an eighth-grader at Cherokee Middle School, and she’s into running also, and dance. Running our kids around is a lot of our life. Teenagers are very busy in lots of things.

Interview by Features Editor Maria Hoover. You can e-mail her with suggestions for future installments of this feature at mhoover@sbj.net.