Habitat for Humanity and LinkedIn

I was invited by LinkedIn to join a conversation led by Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity, who wrote about how he translates a bold mission into action. In the LinkedIn interview, Jonathan shared tips about how to combine the urgency of field work with a careful strategic focus on societal issues. 

LinkedIn's message to me was:  'If you also are trying to change individual lives – and society – at the same time, it would be great to include your story in the conversation, too. Check out the active discussion around this post and then add your perspective."

I started to do that then found that there was not enough space. So I'm posting my comments here.

I first connected with Habitat for Humanity in the 1990s. I felt that they had a great opportunity to educate the people who were building houses and providing funding about the greater issues that caused there to be a need for the organization in the first place.

Below is a map story that my organization created.

Since houses are built following plans laid out in blueprints, I felt that organizations like this would be unique in their ability to help people think of "all the things that need to be done, in the proper sequence" to help reduce the poverty surrounding so many people.

People who entered this work as carpenters and home builders could become disciples who turned around and got more people involved in other work that needed to be done. Imagine if that had been happening across the country for the past 30 years.

I led volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago from 1975 to 2011 and created the Tutor/Mentor Connection in 1993 to help similar programs grow in all high poverty areas, and constantly improve how they help kids through school and into adult lives free of poverty. In the programs I led I shared a library of information I had been collecting, in an effort to educate our volunteers and turn them into evangelists for tutoring/mentor programs.

Thus, my suggestion to Habitat for Humanity was based on my own leadership efforts for the previous 20 years. 

In 1993 we started building a list of nearly 150 Chicago tutor/mentor programs and connecting them to us and each other via conferences and newsletters that library became available to every program, along with the goal that each was educating their volunteers so more people were focusing on all the work needed to help kids to careers.

As the Internet became a tool our library expanded and so did the number of people potentially using that information.  

In early 2000s I posted a list of eLearning goals on this page of the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC website.  Imagine if thousands of nonprofits who focus on youth, education, poverty, inequality, etc. were all contributing ideas to concept maps like the one below, which represents a blueprint leaders could follow in every part of the country.

Creating a library and drawing users to it is a huge challenge, in a single organization, and across organizations.  Below is a 4-part strategy that I launched in 1993 and have followed since then.

Step 1 focuses on collecting information about a problem and potential solutions.  Step 2 focuses on building public awareness and drawing people to the information being collected. Step 3 focuses on helping people understand the information and ways to apply what they are learning.  Step 4 uses maps to focus actions on all high poverty areas within any geographic region, instead of just a few high profile places. 

I think any organization can adopt this strategy, and help innovate ways to build a larger, and larger, collection of people who give time, talent, dollars .... and votes, to build the systems needed in every high poverty zip code to "change individual lives, and society, at the same time".

However, it's 2023 and as a nation we're not even close to the type of connected ecosystem that I envisioned in the late 1990s and when I posted our eLearning goals.  Thus, there's still much, much more that needs to be done.

Maybe LinkedIn can help make that happen. 

Thanks for reading.

I hope to connect with you on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon.