Building Hope: the first 25 years of Housing Hope

The Housing Hope story unfolds over 25 years from church basements to the halls of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's a story of local people who want to solve family homelessness and make a dent in the affordable housing crisis. From humble beginnings, the Building Hope chronicle portrays how a community comes together to make stone soup. At the heart of the story is the word HOPE. The founders of Housing Hope desired for every child to have a home and every parent to have hope for the family future. Formed as a housing development corporation the organization launched an amazing continuum of fifty five housing developments. Along the way it discovered that housing was more than an end, it could be a means to even higher ends. As new service programs were added over time the organization utilizing housing to create strong families and healthy communities. As the quarter century comes to an end a new economic development corporation, HopeWorks is created. This new entity is designed to replicate the Housing Hope model in a job training and employment initiative to produce career pathways for homeless families and indigent households through social enterprise businesses. As author David Buerge tells this story, he says this is no small potatoes.