Throughout the month of December, the Charitable Giving Coalition will be featuring a variety of voices in the charitable sector through our Season of Giving Guest Blog Series. These posts feature a fraction of the endless good work America’s nonprofit organizations are doing.
Around the world, home has become the classroom, the gym, the restaurant, and the playground. For many of us, home has been our safe haven and our protection from the outside world. Through the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, staying home has been the first line of defense against the spread of the virus.
But for too many families in the U.S. and around the world, the safety and security of home remains out of reach. Even before the pandemic hit, more than 18 million households in the U.S. were spending half or more of their income on housing costs, and more than 1.6 billion people globally lacked adequate shelter. The economic impact of COVID-19 has substantially increased the number of people struggling with the impossible choice of covering the cost of housing and other basic needs, like food, heat and health care.
Habitat for Humanity launched our Homes, Communities, Hope + You campaign to raise funds to address housing issues that have been exacerbated and exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Joined by hundreds of federated Habitat organizations around the world, the campaign is supporting our work in communities across the U.S. and around the world that have been hit hardest by the pandemic, as well as amplify our advocacy work to ensure housing is prioritized in economic recovery plans. For more than 40 years, Habitat has partnered with families around the world to build homes, communities and hope, and charitable contributions have been critical to that effort. In these unprecedented times, the need for home has never been more profound, and we are needed now more than ever to help families build a brighter future.
While we may be celebrating the holidays differently this year, the one thing that remains is home. We must think of the families who need our help, and we can’t do it by ourselves. With the contributions of our supporters, and the efforts from our leaders at all levels of government, we can make the dream of home a reality for every individual and every family.
Jonathan Reckford
CEO
Habitat for Humanity International