How We Design Homes Specifically for Nonprofits
We want you, our impact investors, to have a better understanding of how we support our nonprofit partners. So, in this, we’d like to discuss how we design custom homes for specific nonprofit partners.
We don’t do this for every nonprofit partner. Some partners look for housing much like any other tenant would. But other times we design a property specifically for a nonprofit partner.
This blog post talks about what that looks like…
How the Design Process Starts
When we first partner with a nonprofit, we talk about their program and their housing needs and their population. Sometimes, the nonprofit starts out wanting to own a property. So, we help them think through what that would actually cost and everything that goes into owning it.
Once they understand all of that, some choose to explore renting as an option. And that gives us the opportunity to say, “We’d be happy to build something that fits your needs and rent it to you.”
If they agree, we start the custom-design process by asking, “What do you want and where do you want it?”
From there, we can get pretty practical. We ask questions like, “How many people are going to live there? Will they share bedrooms? How much privacy do they need? Do they need a larger home that can accommodate more people, or smaller spaces where fewer people live together?”
The location also plays a big role. Because every nonprofit has a geographical location they serve, they typically have very specific requirements of where they’d like to rent.
And for several of our nonprofit partners, we’ve been able to design properties around their needs and geographic preferences.
Custom-Designed Examples
Here are three examples of when we’ve designed or redesigned properties around the needs of specific nonprofit partners and the people they serve.
Women Who Have Aged Out of Foster Care
We designed a home for a nonprofit that serves women who have aged out of foster care. For this design, each bedroom had its own bathroom. Having a bathroom for every bedroom isn’t something we would include in a typical rental. But we included them to serve these women better.
For another property that supported this nonprofit, we took a single-family house and turned it into a duplex so some of the women with children could have their own studio apartment. This gave them more privacy instead of requiring everyone to share the same living space.
A Prison Re-Entry Program
We designed a home for a nonprofit’s prison re-entry program that has five bedrooms and four baths with extra kitchen and bathroom space. It has two refrigerators in the kitchen because when eight men live in a house, one refrigerator isn’t big enough. We made sure the bedrooms were large, knowing that most of them (with the exception of the house leader) were going to be sharing a bedroom.
We also made the bathroom that would be shared by most of the men the largest bathroom in the house, with extra countertop space so everyone would have room for their things.
An Apartment Complex for Rapid Re-Housing
We partnered with a nonprofit that provides rapid re-housing for people who need to move into a home really quickly. For this nonprofit, we redesigned an apartment complex that we had already designed.
The original design was based on the market and what we thought would work. But when we talked with this nonprofit, we learned that they mainly served single people or single-parent families. They didn’t need as many three-bedroom units. They needed studios, one-bedroom units, and some two-bedroom units.
Based on that feedback, we redesigned the entire building. We still included a few three-bedroom units, but we added more studios and smaller units that were a better fit for the people this nonprofit serves.
Why This Matters to Our Impact Investors
Your investment gives us the opportunity to provide housing that can better fit the needs of the people our nonprofit partners serve.
When we know who will be living in a property, we can sometimes make practical decisions, from adding another refrigerator to changing the unit mix of an entire building, that help nonprofits serve others better.
And your investment helps make that possible.
If you’re not already an impact investor with us, we invite you to explore what that looks like.
