What is The Fuller Center for Housing?
- The Fuller Center for Housing is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that seeks to eradicate poverty housing by promoting partnerships with individuals and community groups to build and rehabilitate homes for people in need.
What is The Fuller Center’s vision?
- The United Nations estimates that more than one billion people around the world live in substandard housing — including millions in the United States. The Fuller Center for Housing, faith-driven and Christ-centered, promotes collaborative and innovative partnerships with individuals and organizations in an unrelenting quest to provide adequate shelter for all people in need worldwide.
How do you accomplish your work?
- The Fuller Center creates partnerships within communities that bring together churches, schools, businesses and civic organizations to build decent, affordable homes in partnership with people who are unable to secure adequate housing by conventional means.
- The Fuller Center works in collaboration with our covenant partners, other service-oriented organizations and countless volunteers to build and repair homes. All homeowners work hand-in-hand with volunteers to build their own homes, which are then sold to them on terms they can afford, based on the Biblical idea of no-profit, no-interest loans.
- With some smaller renovation projects, an innovative payment program called The Greater Blessing Program is utilized, whereby recipients promise to repay the loan amount without signing an actual mortgage agreement. They decide the monthly amount they can afford to repay and the period of time that it will take to repay the cost of repairs. There is no legal obligation to repay these loans. It is a leap of faith in the basic goodness of humankind and is proving to be very successful.
- We are committed to good stewardship and work hard to keep our administrative costs low and to select our recipient families wisely. This helps to ensure that the vast majority of your tax-deductible gifts go toward building and repairing homes for those in need.
How are families selected?
- All decisions about family selection are managed by the board of directors of each local covenant partner. Income requirements vary from community to community. However, there are three basic criteria that everyone uses: applicant need (can’t qualify for conventional loans), applicant willingness to partner (“sweat equity” volunteer hours required) and applicant ability to pay the mortgage on their new home or ReNew project or ability to donate through their Greater Blessing project.
Are you a Christian organization?
- Yes. The Fuller Center is an ecumenical Christian organization that bases its work on what Fuller Center founder Millard Fuller called, “The Economics of Jesus” and “The Theology of the Hammer.” We work in partnership with people around the world, of all faiths and backgrounds, to build God’s Kingdom on earth by improving and transforming lives.
Do you have to be a Christian to be affiliated with The Fuller Center?
- No. We welcome all volunteers who share our basic belief in giving dignity to all by helping them own a home. We believe Jesus would not want us to place religious requirements on beneficiaries, so we don’t.
Where does The Fuller Center stand on issues of inclusiveness?
- Knowing that God is love, and valuing the worth of every human being, The Fuller Center for Housing does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation or sexual identity in joyfully welcoming people from all walks of life as volunteers or in selecting beneficiaries for our services.