The Home Depot Foundation has implemented its focus on affordable housing, built responsibly for about six years. Given that, we have supported many nonprofit organizations that finance and build affordable housing for five years give or take and are conducting mid-decade reviews with each of our national partners. During these conversations, I was struck by the evolution many of the nonprofits have experienced as the definition of what “good” building is has changed for all construction, but particularly for affordable housing units.
When we began discussions with these groups, we asked the nonprofits to balance the goals of building homes that were efficient, while they were healthy and while they maintained their affordability. A couple of them were already thinking about “green” building, a few were interested to learn more, and several were indifferent, leaning toward cynical, about incurring extra expense during construction with only the promise of a long-term return. After sometimes a series of conversations, we funded each and everyone one of them to provide training and grant dollars to their members to make the homes they were building energy efficient, water conserving and healthy. And they each took the money saying they would advocate for the benefits of energy efficient, healthy homes.
After five years, several missteps and slow starts, essentially everyone now agrees that homes for families of modest incomes should be built to minimize utility costs and maintenance expenses and provide a healthy environment - both inside the home and in the surrounding neighborhood. We have invested tens of millions of grant dollars to help educate and train nonprofits and defray the costs, which are sometimes significant and sometimes minimal, to build green affordable homes. Our partners now wholeheartedly embrace green building.
But I have to wonder whether we did the right thing by all of these groups. We thought we knew that building to ensure the long-term affordability of a home was the right thing to do for the families, even if the nonprofit working directly with them wasn’t so sure. We thought we knew better and by offering grant dollars to do what we as a Foundation wanted, we pulled many nonprofits into an area they wouldn’t have otherwise gone. We knew some of them were talking the talk to us, but weren’t really walking the walk in terms of providing organizational support for the programs we funded. We were frustrated by their lack of enthusiasm and sluggish progress. We did this even though we tell organizations not to stray from their goals to go after grants and that we want to support what they have set as their priorities.
In hindsight, after the economic meltdown and the foreclosure crisis of the last 18 months, in practical terms we can say we were right in challenging affordable housing developers to think differently about their building. I’m still not sure we were completely right in using grant funds to entice organizations to meet the Foundation’s strategic goals rather than their own. I do, however, continue to believe that asking nonprofits - as well as our own organization - to question both what they are doing and how they are doing it is an important role that philanthropic organizations can - and should - play as we partner to meet the enormous issues facing our communities. Going forward, as we continue to build funding partnerships, we will be unapologetic about pushing them outside of their comfort zone, raising the bar and taking measured risks to advance our combined capacity and impact.
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