Blue Ridge Habitat for Humanity

Homeownership (shelter) is a crucial foundation for helping low-income families find a path out of poverty. When they move out of substandard housing and into Habitat homes, homeowners and their families frequently improve their health, educational attainment, safety, and personal wealth. Habitat provides the opportunity for partner families to participate in a self-empowering program that helps families help themselves. This is not an entitlement program, but rather a program that gives a hand-up, not a hand-out. Partner families have to meet the income requirements, and they have to demonstrate both a need and a desire to partner. As a partner, Habitat builds houses with families, not for them. Thus, our organizational goals are to increase our families' Strength, Stability, and Self-Reliance through homeownership, and to ultimately revitalize underserved neighborhoods in our service area.

BRHFH undertakes four primary, or core, strategies for increasing Strength, Stability, and Self-Reliance of our partner families:

1) New home construction and rehabilitation of existing homes:
- Build/rehabilitate 4-5 additional safe, decent, and affordable homes annually, with plan to increase capacity in future years
- Provide required homebuyer educational programs (budget, finance, home maintenance)
- Require "sweat equity" as part of the partnership with BRHFH
- Continue with EarthCraft certification of all homes, to provide a green and energy-efficient standard footprint in the community
- Begin to build more to scale to meet the needs of the affordable housing crisis facing this country

2) Critical home repair weatherization projects:
- Develop program to identify and deliver programmatic activities to address home repair needs of existing partner families and non-partner family homeowners to allow families to age in place, as well as to address key deferred maintenance issues impacting lower-income families
- Focus program on both critical home repair (internal), and basic home maintenance support (external)

3) Neighborhood Revitalization Program:
- Continue to support Norris Village rental units, and transition each unit into homeownership over the next five years
- Support neighborhood, community engagement programs like Rock The Block, Day of Service, United Way's Day of Caring, and MLK Day
- Partner with community non-profits to leverage greater impacts, such as Free Clinic (health) and Literacy Volunteers Winchester Area (education)

4) ReStore retail operations:
- Provide community with outlet for recycling gently used home improvement products
- Provide community with discounted, quality products for home improvement
- Provide BRHFH with revenue to support admin/overhead costs to reduce reliance on grants and donation funding for these costs
- Provide green programs to reduce waste in our community's landfills

1) Board:
- Dedicated and engaged volunteer Board of Directors
- Working Board, with all Board members involved in one or more committees to support the work directly
- Board members with experience, proper skill sets, and institutional knowledge (2 x Board members were original founders in 1997)

2) Staff
- Appropriate number of staff members to support the mission (Exec Dir, Construction and Safety and construction support staff, Dir Program Services, Dir Marketing/Resource Dev, ReStore Dir and ReStore staff)
- Construction Director and ReStore Director with experience, community connections, and proven expertise
- Long-term partnership and experience with the EarthCraft certification program

3) Volunteers
- Dedicated and consistent volunteer homebuilding crew leaders with needed capacity to build the homes envisioned. Crew leaders also have the experience and proven success, as well as institutional knowledge (senior crew leader has participated in 63 of 65 home builds to date)
- Winchester-Frederick-Clarke-Shenandoah Counties are well-known for being a giving community and volunteerism is very strong. We consistently acquire and receive adequate volunteer support from the faith community, from corporations, schools/university, and individuals within the private sector

4) Resource Development
- We have proven success writing public and private foundational grants to support our work
- We are very competitive within the community for donations and fundraising with the faith community, corporations, and individuals
- We have proven, long-term relationships with our much-needed in-kind trade partners to supply donated, at cost, or reduced cost materials and skill-based services

To date, this year, we are on track to be successful with our stated goals and objectives:
1) Completed and closed on 3 homes in 2017, and have 5 homes currently underway in 2018-2019.
3) Completed 3 major neighborhood, community engagement events in 2016, and have 3 major events lined up for 2019.
4) ReStore celebrating our 11th year anniversary, and we recently relocated to a larger store (34,000 square feet), tripling our previous store size. Revenue continues to grow and we are thus able to continually expand our programs and the resources needed to meet those needs.
5) Recently hired a critical home Repair Program Coordinator, we have completed 11 repairs to date in 2018, and are looking to expand that even further now.