What is Habitat for Humanity (Part 1)

Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) is a nonprofit, ecumenical Christian organization dedicated to eliminating substandard housing and homelessness worldwide and to making adequate, affordable shelter a matter of conscience and action. Habitat is founded on the conviction that every man, woman and child should have a simple, decent, affordable place to live in dignity and safety.

The ultimate goal of Habitat for Humanity is to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the face of the earth by building adequate, basic housing. All of Habitat’s works and actions are for the ultimate purpose of putting shelter on the hearts and minds of people in such a powerful way that poverty housing and homelessness become socially, politically, and religiously unacceptable in our nation and the world.

Habitat has an open-door policy: all who desire to be a part of this work are welcome, regardless of religious preference or background. Habitat for Humanity has always had a policy of building with people in need regardless of race or religion, and we welcome volunteers and supporters from all backgrounds.

The work of Habitat for Humanity is driven by the desire to give tangible expression to the love of God through the work of eliminating poverty housing. Habitat’s mission and methods are predominantly derived from a few key theological concepts: the necessity of putting faith into action, the “economics of Jesus” and the “theology of the hammer.”

More to follow.

Mike Wood

The History of the Michigan ReStore Committee

  

About three years ago, a small group of people, including myself,  representing ReStores from across the state formed an informal group called MARS (Michigan Association of ReStores).  The mission of the organization was to maximize the potential ReStores across the state and ultimately the HFH mission.  We had developed bi-laws for governance which included an electoral system.  At the time, Michigan was divided into three regions: a northern, a southwest and southeast region.  At the 2005 AIM (Affiliates in Motion) conference, we unveiled MARS, and ReStores from all over the state met together and elected three representatives from each of their respective three regions to sit on the board of directors.  Once that was accomplished, those nine representatives elected a chairman and developed an agenda to carry them through for the next year.  This group met on a bi-monthly basis working on items ranging from developing a Standards of Excellence for all ReStores, to marketing strategies and a communication infrastructure for Michigan based ReStores.

 

At the AIM conference in 2006, I was elected to chair the committee, and I set forth on a very ambitious agenda full of ideas that had plagued me for years, including the formalization of our organization, adopting standards of excellence for all ReStores to abide by, large scale solicitation of gifts in kind, a statewide ReStore warehouse network, and mass marketing for ReStores.  Soon, the work MARS was doing was noticed by Habitat for Humanity of Michigan and became an informal committee of HFHM.  HFHM resources were allocated to the ReStore Committee via Anna Beningo as our ReStore Coordinator.  In 2007, HFHM was coordinating large scale donations, including a generous donation from the Embassy Suites in Chicago.  In early 2008, the committee worked feverishly on opening the first statewide warehouse with ReStores fueling the demand for product via their customers.  In the first two and a half months of operation, the warehouse had funneled over $250,000 in donated product to ReStores across the state!  In May 2008, the HFHM board of directors officially recognized our committee and we formally became the Michigan ReStore Committee.  The most recent milestone has been the extension of our prison build program by having inmates build cheap, simple, and functional furniture to be sold in our ReStores across the state.  I believe this was the easiest money I’d ever found (per time spent) – a five minute phone call with Mike Green, DOC coordinator of the prison build program.

 

At the time MARS was formed, it was the only statewide ReStore association in the country.  The Michigan ReStore Committee, which I’ve chaired for the past two years, is/was the only formal statewide committee of its kind.  When we started, there were fewer than 20 ReStores in Michigan, and now there are 37 ReStores.  We were the first state to know exactly how much revenue was being generated by their ReStores ($6,471,119.25 in the 2007 calendar year) because we surveyed all the ReStore on a quarterly basis.  We’ve incorporated this reporting into our standards of excellence and will soon be required of every ReStore in the state.  We were the first state to develop a standards of excellence for ReStores, a document which HFHI used in developing their, yet unreleased, standards for ReStores across the country.  This was done at an HFHI sanctioned meeting in Atlanta last fall when I was invited, as one of five people, to draft a set of standards.  Our Standards of Excellence were a central document used in those discussions.  Finally, we are the only state in the country able to take very large scale donations via our warehouse and distribute those donations equitably to all the ReStores in our region.  It’s important to note, that while the warehouse is a HFHM entity, we’ve always maintained that all HFH affiliates would be welcomed to draw from the warehouse. 

 

So as one can see, the work being done in Michigan to maximize the potential of ReStores has been awesome over the past several years.  Being apart of this movement has been among my proudest achievements.

 

 

Mike Wood

The Impact of ReStores on the Habitat for Humanity Mission

I’ve tried for several years to get more attention paid to ReStores because I knew their impact on HFH was huge.  But how big is it?  Take a look at the following:

 I estimate that there are about 600 ReStores and they collectively grossed about $250,000,000 in sales last year, which is only an average of  $416,666/store.  My little $4000sf store in northern Michigan serving a population of only 23,000 people does about $200,000/year, so I feel the average per store is probably low at $414,666, but let’s use it anyway.  There are dozens of stores doing several millions of dollars per year.  Anyway, according to the HFHI 2006 annual report, they estimate that the entire HFH movement grossed $1.2bil.  This would mean that ReStores contributed 20.8% to the entire HFH movement!  Now, considering that most ReStores are located in the US and Canada, the impact of ReStores on just those two countries is even greater.  How many times was the word ReStore used in that report?  I don’t believe I saw it used even once.  Why? 

 Now, let’s do something really fun.  The Canadians developed a formula for determining tons diverted – 1.3lbs per $1.00 gross sales.  Assuming $250mil last year, that is 325,000,000lbs from landfills, or 145,089.29 tons!  In the days of green thinking, I think that deserves a headline somewhere.  Maybe Al Gore, Mr. Green himself, has some extra change he’d pony up!

 What about families impacted, which is what HFHI is now trying to focus on?  The biggest trick for ReStores is determining what the net effect is for the affiliates because everyone calculates it differently.  For the sake of assumptions, let’s assume that ReStores are spinning off 30% net to their affiliates.  That’s what my store does.  At $250mil, the net would be $75,000,000.  OK, the last I heard was that the average cost per Habitat home was about $60,000.  So that $75mil translates into 1250 homes/families served.  Now, how many families are being served by way of employees?  Donors?  Shoppers?  Thousands?  Tens of thousands?  At the last conference I went to, the HFHI speaker talked about their projected families served but didn’t take ReStores into account.  ReStores are probably hitting their five year projection every week.  ReStores are simply not part of the equation.  Why? 

 The reason I wrote this is because important people need to know that ReStores are a cornerstone of HFH.  There is a marketing opportunity here that needs to be exploited.  My numbers are probably off, but the exact numbers are still not known.  Why?  With a story this big, the numbers need to be known.  I know that if HFHI were to put their entire weight behind ReStores, we could double the output of ReStores in the next five years, and triple the output in ten years, and the impact on the global community would be staggering!

 Food for thought.

 

Mike Wood