Habitat for Humanity: give what they can use, not what you can spare

What it is

Habitat for Humanity chapters build homes at cost on donated material and donated skilled labor. That model sits closer to a general contractor's own than most charities do, so a firm with trucks, supplier accounts, crews and an estimating desk can give in ways a check cannot.

Tellus Design and Build, the firm Jesse Fowler ran, chose Habitat as its community partner in the counties where it was already building.

What Common Ground did

• From February 2007, sent surplus material off active jobs to local chapters instead of the dumpster, bid Habitat work, put crews on build days and gave construction advice chapters could not otherwise pay for.
• When chapters grew selective and began passing on material, read that as information, not the end of the relationship: what had filled up was the chapter's yard, not its need for a builder. The old question, how much the firm could afford to give, measured the wrong side of the table.
• Split what Tellus gave into stock and flow. Material has to be stored and sorted, so a chapter's capacity for it fills. Bid work, labor and consulting are used the day they arrive.
• Set a simple trigger: a second decline of a channel inside one season closes that channel with that chapter, and a flow replaces it without shrinking the commitment.
• Asked each chapter what the coming season needed from a contractor before offering what Tellus had spare. Where the yard was full, the offer became an estimator's time on a bid, a crew on a build day or an opinion on a detail.
• Kept the decision per chapter and priced the flows honestly inside the firm, since a crew day or an estimator's afternoon is payroll pulled off billable work.

Results

• A partnership that ran from February 2007 to November 2016 across Santa Barbara, Orange County and Los Angeles.
• Chapters kept getting bid work, crews and advice from a builder they knew after they stopped needing material.
• What came back to Tellus was standing: a firm that kept showing up, bid after bid and season after season, became a partner the chapters could plan around.
• The surplus-capacity rule: name each gift as a stock or a flow, ask before offering, close a channel on the second decline in a season, switch to a flow without shrinking the commitment, and track the open channel per recipient.

External links

• Public data room: Habitat for Humanity data room

At a glance