ABWK Advice... Talk to Successful Affiliates

A Brush with Kindness and all of the other names associated with home restoration (please don't call it a repair program) is a wonderful way to expand your affiliates impact on families struggling to find or remain living in a safe, decent home.

There is a lot of good information about how to start and grow your program as well. However, there is also advice being given from a variety of reputable sources (that should know better) that can side-track and even cripple your program.

Much of the information being shared about ABWK is solid and will help your affiliate get up and running fairly quickly. You may even be serving 10 - 20 families a year or more. And when you're going from serving zero families in this manner to serving a dozen or more in a short span (maybe in your first year), it can create excitement at your affiliate and some good buzz in the community. This should be lauded and celebrated as wonderful accomplishments.

Yet, I've seen too many affiliates get started with great anticipation only to get sidetracked from crippling issue's that were created from receiving poor, untested advice from well meaning "Habitat Housing Experts." These experts have come from the national, state and local affiliate level. Many of which give 70% solid advice and 30% that is just plain awful advice.

Much of the advice (which I'm sure is well intended), comes from trying to treat low-income homeowners in the same manner as first time Habitat homebuyers. While we can all agree that the Habitat principles for first time homebuyers is tried, tested and tremendously successful, it does not mean these principles apply to all other homeowner situations.

While in general, many of these Habitat principles can be applied to ABWK programs, most of them need to be significantly adapted to families who are at a different place in their lives than our first time homebuyer families. Most ABWK families have purchased their homes with a traditional mortgage and have already invested significant resources into them over the years.

ABWK families do not need a hand up but more like a steadying hand to allow them to recover from unfortunate circumstances and remain living in a safe, healthy home they have worked hard to acquire and maintain.

So be careful where you get your ABWK program advice. Talk to several successful affiliates (preferably ones that are serving at least 30 - 40 families a year) about how they have started, grown and worked through issue's. ABWK is a great way to grow your affiliate and more importantly help to create and preserve more homeownership in your community.

Potential Pitfalls with ABWK

At TCHFH we've had to deal with many issue's along the way as we started and grew A Brush with Kindness. Some of the issue's we have resolved and some we are still dealing with as we continue evolving our principles and practices concerning ABWK.

At TCHFH we've had to deal with many issue's along the way as we started and grew A Brush with Kindness. Some of the issue's we have resolved and some we are still dealing with as we continue evolving our principles and practices concerning ABWK.

Below are the most significant issue's we've had to work through to become a healthy, thriving program. Also, most of the issue's below are also one's we get affiliate inquiries about as well.

- It’s all about the family and their story.
      Focusing on the family first and then the building project will help to answer other issue's.

- Getting everyone at the affiliate on the same page with ABWK
      Should home preservation be as big of a priority as homebuilding? Understanding housing stability and how it complements homebuilding. Is ABWK a drain on homebuilding or an organizational asset?

- Integrating ABWK with homebuilding

- Marketing and dual branding

- Funding projects: be creative and use family stories.

- Don’t chase number of families served: build relationships, tell stories and the numbers will come.

- Who will you serve?

- Choosing qualified families

- Finding eligible families

- Volunteer experience

- Family circumstances: understanding the diversity of family values

- Family partner process/sweat equity

- Communicating effectively with families

- Affordability and repayment

- Working with Vulnerable Adults

- Work scope: where to stop

- Working on a home with lead

- Understanding differences: homebuyers and ABWK homeowners

- Working with current Habitat homeowners

Over the next few months I will focus a blog post on each of the issue's and share how we've overcome potential obstacles to our growth and sustainability. I would love to hear from other affiliates on how you've dealt with these issue's and even others not listed. Understanding and effectively working through these issue's will determine the programs value to your affiliate and it's ultimate impact in your communities. ABWK Manual

ABWK Start-up Questions

Here are some questions to consider
when starting A Brush with Kindness.

A Need For Comprehensive Training

I created an ABWK manual 5 years ago.  In it, I offered a simple yet comprehensive program that could be used to complement an affiliates home building.  The manual offered a way to structure a program that give affiliates great flexibility to meet the specific needs of their affiliate and community.  The manual grew out of a series of 6 workshops I presented to affiliates when I was training them for HFHI. 

However, these workshops are no longer being offered.  Yet, the need for training continues to grow exponentially as seen by the many inquiries I receive from affiliates on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, many missteps could be avoided by giving affiliate staff/board members and volunteer leaders some basic training so that programs could have the best opportunity to quickly get off the ground and start making an impact in their communities.
Today, confusion has greatly increased by taking A Brush with Kindness and dividing it up into 3 smaller programs and pairing it with a Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative that includes homebuilding as well.  Having a targeted approach to our work and being able to provide a variety of housing support to our community is terrific!

However, Twin Cities Habitat has been involved with neighborhood revitalization for years and has found the need to keep the branding simple.  It has been challenging enough to get people to realize we do more than home building without introducing an alphabet soup of programs and acronyms (TCHFH, ABWK, NRI, CHR etc.).

People in the Twin Cities have come to love A Brush with Kindness because it focuses on compassion toward families and provides the community an opportunity to show kindness to their neighbor in a tangible way.  Family focus rather construction focus.  Its not about providing a variety of services (which we do) but providing an opportunity for our community to come together and help their neighbor in a variety of ways(people focus).

There needs to be comprehensive training on the issues surrounding the families we want to serve and then creating a program that meets their needs. 

People focus or construction focus? It will vastly impact the success of your program and affiliate.

Person Centered Programming

ABWK in the Twin Cities has always structured our program around the needs of our families.  Our focus is on who we serve and meeting the needs of those families so they can continue living in a safe, decent home.

We could not be as successful as we have been over the years without structuring our program based on family need rather than the work to be done or based on our home buyer program.  Had we structured ourselves based on the work to be done, we would have relied heavily on our home building based model. 
However, we began by building our structure around relationships with struggling homeowner families, potential volunteers and donors.  As we came to understand the needs of our families we were able to market these opportunities to potential volunteers and donors.

Therefore, we have combined family services, volunteer supervision and construction management into a very tight knit position and then supported that position(s) with staff  to coordinate these services and  relationships with our Habitat Volunteer, Development departments and ReStore.  This has worked extremely well and has allowed us to grow in the number of families served and in the depth of the work scope we provide. 

If we were to change our model that has been successful with homeowner families and integrate into our model that provides services to our home buying families, our growth and scope of program would have been very limited. 
Affiliates need to be aware that the needs of home buying families and homeowner families are very different. 

If affiliates are to reach their potential with ABWK, they need to take two different approaches in certain programmatic area's.  Take advantage of the area's where there is natural synergy (volunteer recruitment and fund raising) with home building but for the sake of effectively serving families, efficiency, coordination and growth there must be individuals dedicated to tasks that are ABWK specific. abwk habitat for humanity

Neighborhood Revitalization

A Brush with Kindness is becoming part of an overall strategy to provide our community with more comprehensive housing services.

These community services fall into 2 categories:

1.     Homebuyer Services: Building/rehabbing homes (construction, land dev., and project management) and Homebuyer development (orientation, application process, education,  mortgage servicing and warranty etc.).

2.     Homeowner Services: A Brush with Kindness - Restoration and Repair (including interior and exterior work), energy efficiency, accessibility, do it yourself (diy) support, partnerships and a comprehensive referral program.

These services together will provide families with a substantial array of home creation and restoration services that increase Habitats impact and help build stronger communities. abwk.net habitat for humanity

"You cannot do all the work the world needs, but the world needs all the work you can do" - Anonymous

ABWK and Affiliate Benefits

If you are like our affiliate at Twin Cities Habitat, we are constantly on the search for funding, in-kind donations, land to build on or homes to rehab.  However, with our ABWK program we have opportunities to serve families at a low cost and where there is an abundance of homes to work on.  Also, with the shift in focus at HFHI from homes built to a broader families served metric, gives all of us more opportunities to accomplish our mission.

We have found many benefits to having a program like A Brush with Kindness.  Some of the benefits are as follows:

1. Saving homes from demolition is as important as creating new homes.  ABWK helps to repair and maintain homes to prevent home loss.  75,000 homes are lost each year to demolition - a rate faster than we can build them.
2. ABWK helps further the mission of eliminating poverty housing.
3. ABWK increases an affiliates impact and influence on affordable housing.
4. ABWK creates and enhances partnerships that helps affiliates build more homes.
5. ABWK strengthens our relationships with local municipalities by helping them eliminate "problem properties."
6. Allows affiliates to serve more families.
7. Allows affiliates to utilize more volunteers.
8. ABWK provides affiliates with a more comprehensive and targeted approach to neighborhood revitalization.

A Brush with Kindness helps increase the impact an affiliate can make in their communities by helping more families live in a decent home. Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet, only through experiment, trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved."  -- Helen Keller

ABWK - Some Initial Considerations

A Brush with Kindness has been an important complement to our homebuilding at Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity over the last 13 years.  However, whether it's building, or restoring homes our emphasis is on the families we serve.  Connecting our volunteers and community to the stories of our families has been the key that has helped our ABWK program grow and accumulate the resources to serve 125 families each year.  The following factors have also contributed to the overall success of our program.

1. Getting all staff and board members to buy into the benefits of the program.
2. Taking an inventory of our affiliate resources - financial, volunteer, staff and in-kind and putting together a game plan based on these resources.  We began using donated Valspar paint through HFHI which helped with much of our initial supply cost and helped us leverage other important resources.
3. We started our program with basic exterior repair and painting which is highly visible and makes an immediate impact.  These are low cost and high impact projects that has helped our affiliate gain the experience, resources and reputation to grow its depth and breadth.
4. Program work scope parameters determined the amount of resources we needed to begin.  Also we determined in advance how many families were going to initially serve based on our resources and goals.  What determined the limits of the type of work to be done.  Also, given our initial goals and parameters, we needed to determine how were we going to integrate ABWK into our overall Habitat philosophy and marketing strategy. 
5. Outreach and collaboration with community agencies, businesses, churches and municipalities has helped us identify families in need, increased our resource development and enhanced our reputation with the public.
6. We also targeted neighborhoods based on the relationships we wanted to build or enhance.  But we didn't allow neighborhood boundaries to limit us when other opportunities became available.

These are some of the most important considerations when starting A Brush with Kindness.  In the coming weeks and months I will be expanding on these and other of the most common questions and concerns.  Also, check out the program section of the blog for more information.Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity

"Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see." 

                                                                           - Mark Twain