Gifts in kind, generous companies help make our work possible

Greetings from the beautiful community of Valley, Alabama, where we will begin our annual Millard Fuller Legacy Build tomorrow morning. Our wonderful volunteers begin raising walls in the morning on two new homes and a major renovation project that we will dedicate on Friday. From the moment we raise these walls until Friday’s hugs and tears of joy, we will see volunteers’ sweat, donors’ dollars and several entities’ gifts-in-kind in action.

The Fuller Center for Housing is able to do what we do because of the kindness of others. We have many friends who donate funds to pay for our house building and restoration work and many others who give of their precious time to get the work done. These partners mean everything to us.

Increasingly, we’re receiving more gifts of tools and materials, gifts that significantly affect the cash outlays that our capital-intensive programs require. Every dollar that we don’t have to spend on lumber or other materials is one that can go into getting yet another family housed, so these new partners are making a true difference in the lives of God’s people in need.

A couple of these donors are Christian organizations — World Vision has been a huge supporter supplying products like roofing, siding and fixtures, and CrossRoads Missions has built countless framing packages in church parking lots to be delivered to our building sites.

Every dollar that we don’t have to spend on lumber or other materials is one that can go into getting yet another family housed.

Now we’re seeing more corporate involvement as companies like Wooster Brush, Hyde Tools, Stanley Black & Decker, American Standard and Stihl have stepped forward in the past couple of years to offer support, some with tools and fixtures, some with cash, some with both.

These gifts are a great help to us, but what makes them significant is that they are gifts that don’t have to be made — they are given out of a generosity of spirit. Despite our steady growth, The Fuller Center doesn’t have the national recognition that some of our larger friends in the affordable housing movement enjoy, so we can’t provide these donors with the sort of publicity that they could get elsewhere. It’s been said that true generosity is that which has no expectation of a return. That’s the kind of generosity that these gifts represent.

We’re thankful for these gifts and the simple generosity that they represent. Lives have been profoundly affected by the blessing of a decent home, something that these gifts have helped make possible. On their behalf and from all of us here at The Fuller Center, thank you!