 Welcome to non-profits mean business too. I'm your host, Krista Stadler. And I wanted to tell you a little bit about our show. Our show is designed to shed light on the world of non-profits here in Hawaii. The challenges that go into keeping them operating and hopefully inspiring you to find a nonprofit organization that you would like to support. And today I am so very happy to have Brie Littlefield here. She is the, I'm gonna say it right, funds development manager for Honolulu Habitat for Humanity. Thank you so much for joining us. Krista, thank you for having us. I wanted to take a second and ask you to please, just let us know a little bit about your background, if you're from Hawaii, and also how you came about getting connected with Habitat for Humanity. Also your role, what you do there. Great, great. Yeah, no, not originally from Hawaii. I've actually been here for about two and a half years. Originally I'm from the Northeast to South of Boston. I've been in the nonprofit industry for about nine, almost 10 years, exclusively in development and fundraising. I actually got my start with the Muscular Dystrophy Association out in Massachusetts, eventually transferred to their Rhode Island District office and about two years ago transferred from Providence to Honolulu. We dissolved as an organization here locally in July of last year and I kind of left MDA feeling like my time in the nonprofit world was over and I was ready to kind of explore the next thing. And then as it often does, fate stepped in. I was connected to Jim, the executive director and TJ through a mutual friend who knew that they were looking for a development specialist and thought that, you know, I might be interested in it. And so when I came in to speak with Jim and with TJ the first time, it was all, it just very much felt like the right place to be and the right time to be doing it. And I walked out of that office feeling, you know, like, okay, everything is not what I thought it was going to be. This is not the end of my fundraising career and I'm ready to kind of go all in with Habitat. It's an incredible organization with such a local impact. That's really what drew me in in the first place. So I'm happy to be here. And really my role is actually establishing Habitat's Fundraising and Development Program. So my role is a new one prior to December when I joined the organization. Jim, our ED was doing all of the fundraising and kind of only as it came up, there really wasn't a concerted effort to share our mission or share the stories of our families and solicit support from companies and individuals in our community. So the first six months have been an interesting ride to say the least, but really figuring out what we want our development program to look like and where we can enhance and improve some marketing and other things like that. Wow, so this is just, you've just been with the organization six months. Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness, wow. Okay, well, that's just amazing. So three of it has pretty much been dealing with this COVID-19 situation. It's been very interesting. And yeah, absolutely. Yeah, oh my gosh. So I do want to talk about how the COVID-19 situation pandemic has affected the organization, but I really want to talk first about the programs and then we can talk how they normally, yeah, the ones that you normally support and then go into a little bit about how they've been effective. But I also just want to say all the nonprofit organizations out there, Habitat for Humanity is probably the one I'm the most familiar with. I was on the board in Pona and went out to Women's Builds and all different types of events. So it holds a special place in my heart. So maybe we can start to talk about the restore since, yeah, so there's a restore. So I have a restore here in Kalihi. We've got about a $13,000 square foot warehouse where we accept donations from the community of lightly, gently used home goods and then we sell them at a fraction of their retail value back to the community. Every dollar that we raise in our restore, every purchase that is made from our restore goes directly back to building homes and strengthening our communities through Habitat's mission. But I think it's interesting because restore also serves our community in a sustainability factor where we are actively helping divert waste from Hawaii's landfills, making sure that, your coffee pot still has life in it. I understand you want a new coffee pot. What do we do with these? And Goodwill is great for clothing and reuse. Hawaii is great for raw materials and building lumber. And I think restore has its niche in that furniture appliance home good market. So we get about 10,000 customers through Doors every year which is incredible. We're planning, we would have made about $500,000, half a million dollars in revenue through our restore this year if it wasn't for having to close things down due to COVID and we can get to that a little bit later on. We've got a Rockstar team over there. It's a really interesting opportunity for us to put our mission in front of a unique audience that might not be crossing paths with Habitat if it wasn't for restore. Yeah, I think it's amazing. It was really interesting, I was looking a little bit more about how to actually organize having your products or your items picked up, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. It's very clear information on your website. And also, it was also interesting to me how many building materials you actually do accept. So for someone that's looking to maybe do owner builder or something like that, there are items, those type of items there as well other than just appliances and whatnot. Yeah, we do, we do have a lot of flooring and we're fortunate because we get in-kind donations often through organizations or companies. Granger, for example, just last week I started dropping off like 20 pallets every week. Just, I mean, I don't even know Granger manufactured or had and so it's interesting to see that come through. And then we do get gifts in kind from different contracting groups. Sometimes we'll get a little bit of lumber, but a lot of roofing materials, a lot of jealousy glasses and definitely doors, mattresses, a lot of building materials. And do you use those, do you ever use the items that are donated such as those items that you mentioned in the actual rebuilds or builds? We don't usually use items that come through Restore for our home-built program. Once in a while we will bring, if there is different tools, we just got some brand new circular saws come in and I know that construction took a few of those over the program side of the organization. So usually when we receive gifts in kind from construction companies, if it's a big enough gift and if it is in alignment with what our director of construction has planned for our build, she could say, or this might be a gift suitable for the construction department. Usually when they come in through Restore you'll find this is like, okay, this was left over from our previous job. So we can't do anything with this odd amount of material. So it's not usually big enough to suit the home-built, but certainly we do also partner with companies on that side or groups that want to, I mean, PPG paints, for example, is a local business that donates all of the exterior paint for all of our home-builds and they actually come out and they'll paint with us so we do accepting kind donations toward those projects, but they usually are kind of funneled into separate directions based off what they are. Is there one thing that people ask to have picked up or to donate that frequently gets rejected? I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but just curious. No, no, you know what? I mean, typically what we don't accept are toilets and children's toys. Beyond that, if it's in good shape, we'll usually take it. And the restore team is really good about managing their floor space so that we know that we can turn coaches around a little bit faster than we can turn around countertops. And so they will accept donations and place them accordingly. But if it's in good shape and it's something that we think we can turn around and sell, we really aren't often refusing items. And here's another question. I think I know the answer because I've done it, but can you negotiate when you go into a restore? Can you negotiate on a listed price? So we used to have a very flexible pricing system about four years ago, three years ago, we came under new management and we did away with that. So the prices are as marked, there's no bartering. However, we are on a four-week rotation schedule. So when an item goes out this week, it's priced at full price. Next week, based on the color of the tab, it'll drop down to 75% off and then 50, I'm sorry, 25% off and then 50% off and then 75% off. So the longer it's been here, the greater the discount. We also have our third Thursday events where if you come in on the third Thursday of a month wearing your Habitat t-shirt or your Habitat store, you get 25% off your entire purchase excluding appliances. So we actually spend in deals. That's good information. Okay, well, since we're on the restore, why don't we talk about how the COVID-19 has affected the pandemic has affected the stores, have they been open, are they reopened, are the hours changing, those type of things. Yeah, great. So we did just bring back our restore staff at the beginning of May, took a few weeks to get our bearings together and reopened our store on May 18th. So backpedaling to the month of March, March 17th was the last day that we sold anything in the restore before kind of closing our doors and waiting to see what was going to happen. It wasn't a difficult decision to make. Our leadership was very intentional and thoughtful with the risk that we were posing to our staff and our staff's families and then also our customers. It really was the natural thing to do on March 17th. We didn't right away send everyone home. We kind of closed to the public and took care of some housekeeping in the warehouse. There's a laundry list of things that we all want to get to on a daily basis but often have to put to the side in favor of more pressing or more urgent tasks day-to-day operational things. So we spent those two weeks really kind of rolling up our sleeves and tackling some of those projects that don't get all the attention they deserve all the time. And then at the beginning of April, we made the decision to send everyone home and kind of work safely from a remote status. There were about three weeks of time in April that we had to furlough our staff we're kind of protecting the longevity of the organization of restored habitat. We were fortunate enough to receive a PPP loan. Yeah, so we brought everyone back at the beginning of May kind of on a staggered workforce. So the office team would work two days a week in office and the other days at home and would stagger all of our employees to minimize who's in the building at the same time. And then of course, like everywhere we have rules about wearing face masks and disinfecting surfaces after we use them how many people can be in one space at a time. So we're very conscientious of what we can do right now to keep that curve as flat as it is. And as far as our customers in restore they are also required to wear a mask while they're on property while they're dropping off donations while they're shopping. We have markers on the floor so people know how far away to stay from one another when checking out. And then if we're modifying our hours just a little bit normally we're open 9.30 to 4.30. Right now we're closing at 4pm in the afternoon to give our staff time to close down wipe everything and make sure that we're ready for the day tomorrow. Wow, and how many staff members do you how many staff members do you have and do you also have volunteers that work in the restore? Yeah, so a restore has a team of I wanna say six. We've got a donation intake coordinator who handles everything that comes in. I always tell him like, he's got my favorite job. Yeah, to see all the fun stuff. Exactly. Danny, we have a part time staff person and then two others. So five in the restore and we do partner with a group or the organization called first to work. So we do have some regular volunteers that come in for that program. And they're fantastic. We actually just invited them back to start volunteering at the beginning of June. We had been holding off on volunteers just to keep our numbers of bodies as low as possible. But right now we're slowly reopening our volunteer opportunities and bringing back some of those key volunteers. And then on the organizational side of things we've got about 13 people that work for Honolulu Habitat as a operational team our family services, our volunteer, our leadership, our construction crew. So I think we're small to mid-sized organization and it sometimes feels like the work that we're doing is so much bigger than the amount of bodies that we have. So yeah, I think most nonprofits feel that way. Well, thank you. We're gonna take a little break and then when we get back we're gonna talk about the other programs, building and such. All right, thank you so much and please join us after this break. Aloha, I'm Keisha King, host of Crossroads in Learning on Think Tech Hawaii. On Crossroads in Learning, our guests and I discuss all aspects of education here in Hawaii and throughout the country. You can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich and liven and educate. We are streamed live on Think Tech bi-weekly at 4 p.m. on Mondays. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Aloha. The Profits Mean Business 2. I am here for the second half of our interview with Brie Littlefield with Honolulu Habitat for Humanity. I, Brie, thank you. We'll continue on to talk about the, to me, the most exciting part, which is actually building homes for the people that need them. And I'd really like to talk to you about who are you building for? How do they fly and qualify? Kind of guide us through the process a little bit. Absolutely. So Habitat's home-build program is certainly the program that we're most known for. And we work with families throughout the community of O'ahu, our district territory is actually everything this side of Kunia Road. So there is a Leeward affiliate as well that handles the west side. Right now we're doing a lot of builds in Waimanalo. We have about 14 families in queue to build with us over the next couple of years. And really the way you go about owning a home with Habitat is first and foremost, attending an information session with our family-cared service team. We hold those usually once a year. We'll have a flurry of different home info sessions and we advertise those in advance. They've oftentimes been in the fall or in the spring, but right now we have so many families lined up to build with us that we're not actually openly accepting applications right now. But if we were, let me tell you how you would qualify. So there are three tenants of qualification to build a home with Habitat. And the first, of course, is there being a need, a housing need, whether you are living in a rent burdened or overcrowded or unsafe home. If there is a need for safe housing for you and your family, that's the first and most important aspect of the qualification. And then second is the ability to repay a 0% APR mortgage because contrary to a widely held belief, Habitat does not give owing homes for free. We partner with hardworking families from throughout our community and power them to become home buyers. So we build with volunteers, we build with donated service, donated labor to really minimize the cost of that home. And typically you'll see a new Habitat house cost anywhere between 40 and 60% under market value for the same home built by a private contractor next door. And then we, again, we have a nonprofit organization. So there's a 0% mortgage and we allow that family to repay and invest in their future without tacking on fees and other interest rates that make it often times unattainable for families to purchase a home. And unique to Hawaii, we also do require on a waabu that our families come to us owning land. So given the cost of land in our community would make it astronomically expensive for us to purchase land and then also build a home on that land for our partner family. So in other affiliates, other habitats across the country, oftentimes the land in the home are both secured by Habitat and they're both rolled into that mortgage. So, unfortunately, we're not able to do that. So we do see a lot of families come to us on DHHL land. So having, yeah, having... It's interesting. Yeah, it is. So that just, in a waabu, is that the same, is that all of Hawaii or just the Hawaii? It's just here in Hawaii. Hawaii is on a waabu, yeah. Some of the other affiliates throughout the state have a little bit more access to land and are able to purchase lots at a reasonable price and can offer that as part of their program. But no, in a waabu, we're really limited to, if you have a parcel and it doesn't have to be through DHHL, it just oftentimes is that we're working with families who came up in the lottery and had a draw and now they've got a piece of property and they don't necessarily, or they're not able to build on it. So they partner with Habitat to build a home for themselves. And then partnering, again, is a really key word here because we do require all of our families to invest sweat equity in their home ownership process. So there's about 275 hours that every adult over the age of 18 in a partner family has to complete with Habitat before, during, and after their build. So believe it or not, I mean, even before they get to the point where there are signing papers with us to say, let's start building our house. They're volunteering in our restore, in our offices. They're out, you know, in our neighborhoods, building alongside teacher homeowners to build that sweat equity and really make it, you know, a hand up, not a hand out. These families are truly, truly building their futures, building, you know, their homes, building communities. It's just love that. And I think there is such a misconception out there about Habitat for Humanity in terms of, oh, here's the keys to your house, you know, from that perspective. I also think it's interesting how much the actual homeowner, aside from having to be financially responsible, pay back alone and be part of the building process, they actually have input into the home that's being built, correct? Yeah. And I think that's cool too. Yeah, since they're gonna be paying for it. Yeah, that's kind of the fun part for our families is they come in and we have kind of a menu of here's the different options for, you know, fixtures and finishes and paint colors and the exterior color. So, you know, it's kind of everyone's favorite part. It is putting together the details and really visualizing, you know, what that home is going to look like six, 12 months from that day. It's incredible. So there was a link or a page on your webpage that kind of showed there it is. I think that's just, it's really easy to follow and it kind of outlines the whole process. So if anybody's interested in investigating that further, I would go to Honolulu Habitat for Humanities site and take a look at that. It really lays everything out. Yeah, and this is a graphic that we came up with just a couple of years ago actually to help visualize, help our prospective partner families and even our, you know, community partners understand what the process is like for a family that wants to own a home with Habitat because there are so many layers and there are different facets of qualifying and pre-qualifying and, you know, what do we do first? We also have a lot of, you know, financial literacy resources on home ownership classes for the family so that they can, you know, take care of that home for decades into the future and be able to know that they have the tools and the resources and the understanding of how to be financially responsible so that they can continue to make, you know, loyal payments on their mortgage because what happens is when we get those mortgage payments in, we're able to build capital to go back out in partner with six more families so we rely on partnerships to feed future, you know, of our organization. All right, so as the homeowner, then also required to pay for insurance on the home and any further maintenance as things move forward. Yes, so they do, they pay into an escrow for their property taxes and it really has all of the obligations and commitments of being a homeowner. If something breaks, you know, obviously within reason and within a certain timeframe, we could say whether or not that was, oh, something that, you know, was kind of not our fault, but, you know, okay, it's only been a few months we can come back in and we can redo that for you. And then after a certain amount of time, it's the own wear and tear of that family and how well they're upkeeping and cleaning and maintaining their home. And it's interesting because one of our lesser known programs, our home maintenance or home preservation program is an opportunity for families who have a home, not just a habitat home, but any home at all. If there are repairs or improvements, if you need to make it ADA compliant, so Kapuna from Lake and the age in place, you know, we're able to come in and offer 0% loans on home maintenance projects. So sometimes we will see our habitat homeowners who are just a home 30 years ago come to us and say, you know, I think it's time for a ramp or for a new roof and they'll actually use our program again in a different aspect to help maintain their home. When the loan is fulfilled after the 30 years, are those homeowners, would they be able to sell that home at that point? Yeah. Just like anyone else? Okay, just curious. Wow, there is no, I mean, it's their home, it's their land. All we did was make it possible for them to build on it and invest in their future. Has any of the COVID-19 events affected the builds? So throughout the shutdowns related to our pandemic, we never stopped building. We were not able to meet our volunteers, obviously. So really just came down to our construction staff and we also had the opportunity to partner with a local construction company. Ico Group LLC received a PPP loan and they did not receive a permit for their current project. So they called us and they said, I've got these guys, I'm paying them, we have nothing to build, can we come build with you? We built a house from foundation to being dried in, the roof just went on it. In such a short period of time, Chris, it was absolutely, just those little braces. Oh my gosh, that's inspiring at this time. So inspiring, yeah. Well, isn't it amazing how fast our time went by? I can't believe it, I'm sure we could talk and we should talk offline. But I really appreciate you joining us. Of course, I think Habitat for Humanity is such a wonderful organization and I'm excited for you in your new position. That's very exciting. You've got all you have to go up and get the word out. I actually would like to go on a build soon. So I'll get in touch with you on that. And if anyone is interested in learning more about Habitat for Humanity, please go to their website. I encourage you to do so and we appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us on non-profits mean business too. Aloha.