New Roads, Louisiana packed its veterans’ memorial service on Veterans Day. A few miles away, volunteers quietly built a wheelchair ramp. Everyone cares. Who shows up?
On Veterans Day, Pointe Coupee packed its veterans memorial. A few miles away, a small Baton Rouge nonprofit was quietly building a wheelchair ramp at the American Legion hall. The hard part of its work isn’t the carpentry. It’s turning people who care into people who help.
By Lynn McMorris
At the memorial on the grounds of Pointe Coupee General Hospital, our veterans were honored with speeches, prayers, gun and cannon salutes, and even a flyover to mark Veterans Day 2026.
Just down the road in Ventress, the honoring came with different sounds: drills, hammers, saws and the grunts of physical labor. A crew of Home Depot employees from 10 stores gathered to build a wheelchair ramp and install new lighting and smoke detectors. Some had driven in from as far as Lake Charles and Alexandria.
Cheering for veterans for an afternoon is commendable. Spending your holiday on a ramp at a Legion hall, with no crowd watching, is another thing.
“Most everyone I ever meet is so thankful for what we do,” said Karen Ewing, a board member and volunteer with Rebuilding Together Baton Rouge, the nonprofit behind the build. “They say, ‘Call me, I want to help. I’ll come out and volunteer.’ But they’re time-constrained. They work. They have family. Everybody’s got something going on in their life other than just giving back.”
That gap between caring and doing is the story of Rebuilding Together Baton Rouge.
George Miller, an Army Reserve combat engineer from 1968 to 1973 and member of the local American Legion post, explained that the Legion’s insurer required the ramp. Insurance runs about $5,000 a year, Miller said, and after high utility bills, renting out the hall brings in maybe a couple hundred dollars. A ramp the Legion couldn’t afford was a requirement it couldn’t ignore.
So Miller mentioned it to a man the whole parish seems to know: the UPS driver everyone calls Big Brown. His actual name is James Joseph.
“He goes, ‘Oh, I could help you with that,’” Miller said.
Big Brown has driven the Pointe Coupee UPS route for 25 years and has worked with Rebuilding Together since the COVID years. He also runs his own charity, Big Brown Reaching Back, funded largely by fellow UPS employees. Drivers across the state call him when they spot someone in trouble.
“We see things that you guys don’t see,” he said. “When we have an action, we take action. And we don’t wait. We don’t wait to see who’s going to do something next.”
When he finds someone on his route who needs help, often an older individual who can no longer get down their front steps, he connects them with the nonprofit. They apply, the group reviews and if it approves the request, the volunteers show up.
“He just connects people with people,” Ewing said. “And we do the same.”
Miller said the hardest part of serving veterans has nothing to do with money or lumber.
“Veterans are not going to ask for help,” he said. “You have to find out through word of mouth.”
Rebuilding Together Baton Rouge does critical home repair for elderly, veteran and disabled homeowners in Baton Rouge and the surrounding parishes. The goal is to keep people in their homes longer and more safely, and out of nursing homes.
“We don’t do pretty; we do critical,” Ewing said. That means power and water, roofs, rotted floors, and wheelchair ramps. The group builds about 40 ramps a year.
The math for the people it serves is brutal. “If your income is $1,200 a month and you need a wheelchair ramp for $5,000,” Ewing said, “they just don’t get one. They don’t get in and out of their house.” Many tell her, once the ramp is in place, it’s the first time they have been outside in years.
The group receives about 400 applications a year and can take on 120 to 130 of them, more than 1,000 individual repairs in all. It inspects around 300 homes a year, and each gets smoke alarms, a fire extinguisher, and carbon monoxide detectors where there is gas. Last year, two homeowners called to say a kitchen fire had set off those alarms and they had put it out with the extinguisher the volunteers left behind.
“The most affordable home you’ll ever have,” Ewing said, “is the one you’re in right now.”
Rebuilding Together Baton Rouge runs on a $650,000 annual budget with no government funding. Corporate sponsors and foundations keep it alive. Home Depot, a national partner, gave $100,000 this past year, half of it in gift cards for lumber and supplies. The Wilson Foundation gives every year, and Lowe’s and Exxon have chipped in.
Individual donations, from the many people who care, make up about 10% of revenue.
Asked about the group’s greatest need, Ewing didn’t hesitate. “Funding,” she said. “If it weren’t for funding problems, we’d be three times as big as we are. I mean, tomorrow.”
The organization has seven paid employees, all part-time, and no benefits to offer. It is hiring its first full-time construction manager. Ewing, a volunteer board member, also writes the grants, runs the website and handles much of the fundraising. She took on the technology after the 2016 flood, when the group grew almost overnight and repaired 83 flooded homes.
“We’re just not good at telling our story,” she said. “We’re not loud. We work too much. We’re all tired.”
Big Brown has no quarrel with ceremonies. His question is what happens after.
“I’m all for the saluting,” he said. “But when that person leaves that memorial event, what’s going on right there? What’s happening at home?”
He believes most people do care. “Everybody cares,” he said. “Many people want to help”, he said, “but hold back because they don’t know where to start.”
Ewing doesn’t expect everyone to pick up a hammer. She is asking for something smaller.
“If they could just see it,” she said. “Fifty dollars. If everyone who cared would donate, we wouldn’t be a pauper doing so much work.”
The people who keep Rebuilding Together going are the ones who show up: the volunteers, the part-time crew, the UPS driver who notices who on his route can’t get out the door, the Home Depot employees who spent Veterans Day building a ramp for a Legion hall they may never visit again.
Everyone cares. The ramp at the Legion hall was built by the people who did something about it.
Rebuilding Together Baton Rouge accepts donations and volunteer sign-ups at rtbr.org.
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