A couple months ago, we got a phone call — the kind of call we love to hear. It was a roofing company, Accent Roofing, asking if we knew anyone in Athens who was in need of a roof but didn’t have the resources to fix it themselves.

And of course, we did. In fact, we were about to repair a roof for a local homeowner through our Brush with Kindness program. But the leaks had damaged the home’s kitchen and bathroom floors. So if Accent could replace the roof, we could redirect our funding to replace the floors as well.

The reason they were calling was that Accent Roofing donates one roof to a homeowner in need for every hundred roofs they install, through their Roofborn program. Their last project was putting the roof onto the Jefferson home of Devon Gales, the Southern University football player who became paralyzed after a tragic accident in a UGA game in 2015. But they’d been working in Athens for 20 of their 30 years in business and had yet to donate a roof here.

It turned out to be a wonderful partnership. “There’s a lot of deserving people,” says Accent’s owner Tom Scribbins. “We wanted to find the recipients with the most merit, the ones with the most need. So we reached out.”

Tom worked as a roofer to pay his way through engineering school in the 1970s, but ended up preferring the work to sitting behind a computer. He started moonlighting, then dropped engineering altogether for the roofing business. The Roofborn 101 program was born out of the Scribbins family’s Christian faith and a desire to contribute to the communities that give them a living.

“Our culture tends to celebrate people who give from their surplus, the billionaires and celebrities with their foundations,” says Scribbins, “but we always admired everyday people who budget for charity as part of how they live, and that is the model that we decided to follow, putting away one cent on the dollar to give back.” This project was Roofborn #11.

All Accent roofs follow the same process, no matter how large or small, including the donated roofs. Even when that presents a challenge. “This roof was 18 squares,” says Tom — which is 1,800 square feet in roof-speak. “Well, the Gales house was almost five times as big! We didn’t know that going in, and frankly, we hadn’t put aside enough for a project that size. But we’re good on our word and fortunately when we explained the project to our supplier, the manufacturer ended up pitching in as well and we got it done. But one way or the other that roof had to go on and it had to go on right, because we’re never going to put on a roof we’re not proud of.”

The Athens roof may have been smaller than the Gales roof or the church roof they installed just before this project, but it was indeed one to be proud of, as it not only helped a local homeowner in need but allowed for new floors to be installed by Habitat as well. You can check out the “before and after” and learn a little bit about a roof goes on in the video below.

Thanks, Accent Roofing! We think this is going to be a beautiful friendship.