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Dave Brewton

transformedlives_brewton.jpg“I’ve always had this almost unexplainable interest in affordable housing,” says David Brewton, Associate Executive Director of East Liberty Family Heath Care Center.

For a boy growing up in the wealthy suburbs of Pittsburgh, Dave’s fascination with these ideas was unusual, but his vision only grew clearer as he got older. By his junior year at the University of Virginia, Dave was convinced of one thing: “I felt called to serve the poor in the area of housing in the City of Pittsburgh.”

In February of 1980, Dave returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh to attend the CCO-sponsored Jubilee conference. Tony Campolo was the keynote speaker that year, and his message of what it meant to bring the gospel message to the poor was gut-wrenching to Dave. “The students around me were cheering and clapping, and I was just sitting there kind of blown away,” he remembers. Dave was sensing God’s call on his life and what that would mean.

It was while he was in Pittsburgh that week that Dave also got to meet Robert Lavelle, founder of Dwelling House Savings & Loan. Dwelling House’s mission is to provide low-interest loans for low-income families, and this aligned with what Dave knew he was called to do.

Two weeks after Jubilee, back in Virginia, the Rev. Elward Ellis spoke to Dave’s InterVarsity group. “This was the first time an African American speaker had visited UVA my entire time there,” Dave remembers. “Not only that, but he was from Pittsburgh.”

Rev. Ellis, who was the keynote speaker at Jubilee a year earlier, told Dave about a little inter-racial church in Pittsburgh’s West Oakland neighborhood where he was serving, called Friendship Community Church. He also shared about a new ministry that had just been started by recent University of Pittsburgh graduates who had been involved in the CCO’s ministry and Friendship Church. The mission of this new agency, called Breachmenders, Inc., was to provide affordable housing in the low-income, mostly black neighborhood on the edge of Pitt’s campus.

“The CCO’s influence has been all over my life since that time,” Dave says. Friendship Community Church, one of the few inter-racial congregations in the Pittsburgh area, was in danger of closing its doors in the 1970s, until CCO staff worker Dana Shaw was appointed lay minister. Dana brought with him a handful of students involved in the CCO’s ministry at Pitt, and several of them still worship there today. If Friendship’s doors had not stayed open, Breachmenders may never have been born, and Dave’s connection to this ministry and this area would not be what it is.

Dave came home from UVA that summer to work for Breachmenders, helping to build and rehabilitate houses in West Oakland. A year later in 1981, he graduated from college and returned to Pittsburgh. In 1982, Dave became the first Executive Director of Breachmenders, and in 1984, Dave and his wife, Barbara, moved into West Oakland.

Today, Dave serves as Associate Executive Director of another nonprofit agency which serves the underprivileged of Pittsburgh: East Liberty Family Health Care Center. Dave, his wife Barbara, and three of their four children continue to live in that neighborhood and worship at Friendship Community Church.