Fuller Center receives $500,000 grant from Citi Foundation for housing efforts in El Salvador

The Fuller Center for Housing selected as a Recipient of $500,000 Grant from the Citi Foundation in 2024 Global Innovation Challenge to Advance Solutions to Homelessness in El Salvador. The Fuller Center joins a cohort of 50 community organizations around the world as a Citi Foundation 2024 Global Innovation Challenge recipient working to address homelessness.

While El Salvador’s economy has been on the rise the past few years, generational poverty has left many families still living in shacks and slums. The Fuller Center has built nearly 1,000 simple, decent homes in communities throughout the country, but much more needs to be done.

The Citi Foundation grant will fund 60 new Fuller Center homes in the Apaneca community. Fuller Center homeowner partners repay the costs of construction over time, on terms they can afford, with zero-percent interest and no profit made into a fund to help others in their community get the same hand-up into simple, decent living conditions. This means that Citi’s grant will ultimately fund many more than 60 homes over time as the generosity is recycled.

The Citi Foundation’s 2024 Global Innovation Challenge provides a collective $25 million in catalytic funding to support community organizations around the world working in novel ways to address homelessness.

“This generous gift from the Citi Foundation will provide a stable foundation for 60 families to grow and thrive,” Fuller Center for Housing President David Snell said. “Better yet, this grant is a true catalyst for real and lasting transformation as these families become givers themselves and are able to help pull even more families out of homelessness and poverty housing conditions. The Fuller Center model means that the more families we uplift today, the more families we are able uplift in the future.”

“Since launching the inaugural Global Innovation Challenge in early 2023, we’ve continued to see how community-based solutions are poised to accelerate impact on the ground,” said Brandee McHale, President of the Citi Foundation and Head of Citi Community Investing & Development. “We call this grant support ‘catalytic’ given the multiplier effect it can have on low-income communities. Each organization will not only directly impact the lives of people in crisis today, but also create models that can be replicated in other communities around the world tomorrow.”

As a grantee, The Fuller Center will also have access to a learning community and global network of community organizations working to address this pressing issue. For more information on the Citi Foundation’s Global Innovation Challenge, please visit citifoundation.com/challenge.

For more information about The Fuller Center for Housing’s work in El Salvador, visit fullercenter.org/elsalvador.