How Quakers Help Introduce the Self-Help Housing Model that led to Habitat for Humanity

Introduction to the Sweat Equity (Self-Help Housing) Model 

by Edward F. Moncrief

This introduction explains the role played by Quakers in developing the self-help housing model that was used by Self-Help Enterprises and Habitat for Humanity. From Making Housing Happen: Faith-Based Affordable Housing Models edited by Jill Suzanne Shook, 2nd ed. 2012. See http://makinghousinghappen.com/. 

In the mid Eighties, I was privileged to spend a day with Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity. At the time, I was director of CHISPA[i], a non-profit housing corporation I had founded. I gave Millard a tour through the Salinas Valley’s deteriorating farm labor camps, showcasing various new-construction projects we had developed. We discussed the similarities of our self-help models. CHISPA was engaged in mutual self-help, which employed future owners’ “sweat equity” and harnessed public financing. Habitat’s volunteer self-help model taps “sweat equity” contributed by both the future owners and volunteers, using “the economics of Jesus.” [ii]

Fuller’s book, Love in the Mortar Joints, dedicates a chapter to ”self-help” and explains that it embraces five principles:

1. Christ can multiply the miniscule to accomplish the gigantic, as in the feeding of the multitudes. This teaches us that when we move out in faith, God moves, too, and our small supplies are miraculously multiplied to fill the need.

2. We do not place value on profit or interest, but emphasize meeting human need. Christ will show us how to face the challenges of inflation, indifference, opposition or lack of resources.

3. Christ expects us to immediately put the resources we receive into meeting human needs, and not hoard or stash them away.

4. Every human life, no matter how insignificant it may seem, is priceless.

5. We acknowledge that the needs of people are paramount and the response to those needs is not connected in any way with people’s usefulness or productivity. “Grace and love and biblical economics summarized in Exodus 22: 15, “In our dealings with poor people, we are to charge no interest and seek no profit.”

By the time Millard and I met, mutual self-help housing had been around for twenty years.

In the mid Fifties, a group of Quakers settled in California’s San Joaquin Valley. They brought with them the Society of Friends’ belief that “something of God lives in everyone.” The American Friends Service Committee is the Friends’ organizational expression of their vision that genuine social change is born not of violent revolution but of peaceful and persistent commitment and daily toil rooted in the love of Christ. The AFSC community “works to transform conditions and relationships both in the world and in ourselves, which threaten to overwhelm what is precious in human beings.” It nurtures “the faith that human conflicts can be resolved nonviolently, that enmity can be transformed into friendship, strife into cooperation, poverty into well-being, and injustice into dignity and participation.”[iii]

The story goes that one of these Friends, Bard McAllister, loved to whittle. In the early Sixties, as a staff member of the AFSC’s Farm Labor Project in Visalia, he could be found circulating among the squalid labor camps of Tulare County, seated in some hot and dusty front yard whittling away and listening to the Mexican campesinos tell of their lives and dreams. His Quaker values taught him that listening, rather than speaking, was a way both to teach and to learn; as he listened, he learned that these immigrant workers dreamed most about a home of their own.

Some say that AFSC is the slowest moving organization in the world, yet always the first one there. In the late 1930s and early ‘40s, on a couple hundred acres of Pennsylvania farmland, AFSC helped to organize Penn-Craft. There, the Friends borrowed from the frontier experience of barn raising—neighbors helping neighbors—to create a support system for community building with the area’s poverty-stricken and disenfranchised coal miners. The effort began with families helping each other to build their homes.[iv]

So, the Friends came to the San Joaquin Valley equipped with a faith, a vision, and a very practical set of skills and experiences essential to any success story. Their timing was also excellent. Edward R. Murrow, a well-known commentator, aired Harvest of Shame, an early television documentary in which he exposed the plight of immigrant workers, living “on the edge of your cities.”[v] In Fresno County, a feisty photojournalist by the name of George Ballis, shot telling photos of shabby mining shacks re-located in Three Rocks where some thirty immigrant farm worker families shared one rusty water faucet. The photos were picked up first by the national media and then were printed in the Moscow daily, Pravda, under the headline, Capitalist’s Treatment of their Workers. Suddenly, despite years of inertia and resistance from federal housing officials, the government was interested in farm labor housing.

AFSC’s first self-help housing projects were developed in Goshen, Three Rocks, and Cutler. Prophetically, Goshen, the fertile land assigned to the Israelites in Egypt, came to mean “a land of plenty.”[vi] Families were organized into groups of ten or so. Construction supervisors taught the needed skills to lay foundations, pour cement, raise walls, string wire, and nail roofing. They worked evenings and weekends, men and women alike, contributing some twelve to fifteen hundred hours of “sweat equity” labor over several months. No one could move in until all of the homes were finished. Financing came in the form of low-interest mortgages from the US Department of Agriculture’s Farmers’ Home Administration (now Rural Development Services).

From these early experiences, mutual self-help housing was born. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 institutionalized the model. Farmers Home Administration began funding rural non-profit housing organizations to provide supervision and support to self-help projects across the country. During the Seventies, the pioneering work of the AFSC’s Farm Labor Committee and of its leaders (McAllister, Howard Washburn, and Bob Marshall, among others) pushed the State of California to create and fund pre-development financing programs, and to provide grants and loans to non-profit development organizations. As a result, the State’s rural housing programs for migrant farm workers became a model for the nation. Self-Help Enterprises in Visalia, the first test case, became the nation’s most productive mutual self-help housing developer, assisting over five thousand families throughout the southern San Joaquin Valley since 1965.

During my Salinas Valley tour with Millard, we agreed that each form of these sweat equity self-help methods has its strengths: Mutual self-help housing with its emphasis on establishing a community of homeowners among low-income families who must work together to achieve their dreams; and volunteer-based self-help housing with its ability to involve the broader faith community in the lives of the families who will own the completed homes.

In 1992, Millard’s bold faith pushed the self help model and his board to a new level of production. He proposed a daring initiative: to eliminate all “poverty housing” in Americus, Georgia, and Sumter County, where Habitat is headquartered. Although stunned by his vision, the Habitat Board voted unanimously to accept his challenge. Churches and organizations from all over rural Sumter County, the US and beyond joined in; and by the end of the decade, the goal was met.[vii] This surge in local production helped to spawn Habitat’s exponential growth locally, nationally, and internationally.

 In the chapter that follows, you will read of Millard’s journey and the journey of one congregation that caught Millard’s fever for exponential growth. Self-Help Housing continues to spread across the nation and the world. The tireless leadership of individuals like those first members of the AFSC’s Farm Labor Committee and Millard Fuller bears the fruit of positive and sustainable change in the lives of those most in need.

---

[i] Community Housing Improvement Systems and Planning Association. CHISPA means Spark in Spanish. Edward Moncrief founded CHISPA in 1980, as stated in Love in the Mortar Joints, (Chicago: Association Press, 1980)

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] American Friends Service Committee, Statement of Values adopted by its Board of Directors, June 19, 1994, as reflected on its Website afsc.org

[iv] In the case of Penn-Craft, cooperative relationships blossomed far beyond the construction of housing. A long series of cooperative ventures in housing, farming, and manufacturing are still thriving today, almost seventy years later.

[v] Woody Guthrie, “Pastures of Plenty.”

[vi] See Gen. 45:9–11; 46:27–30; 46:334–7:7; 47:26–28; 50:7–9; Ex. 8:21–23; 9:25–27.

[vii] The Sumter County initiative” Victory House” was dedicated in the fall of 2000.