Fill To Capacity (Where Heart, Grit and Irreverent Humor Collide)
Podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference!Join visual artist Pat Benincasa in conversation with a riveting roster of guests to uncover extraordinary stories of everyday people. Listen as they share their quirky wisdom, unlikely adventures, and poignant life lessons! Fasten your emotional seatbelt for this journey of heart, humor and grit!
Fill To Capacity (Where Heart, Grit and Irreverent Humor Collide)
Hammers, Hearts & Hope: A Housing Revolution
In this riveting episode, Cheri Witt-Brown, a visionary leader, shares how she transformed Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity into a beacon of innovation and hope. Building has always been in her DNA—from childhood days on her dad’s construction sites to leading the charge on groundbreaking affordable housing solutions.
A devastating 2013 flood in Northern Colorado became a turning point in her life, compelling her to join Habitat for Humanity and take on one of today’s most pressing challenges: affordable housing. Cheri reveals how Habitat bridges divides—uniting communities, volunteers, and even political opposites—to create pathways to home ownership and build generational wealth.
Discover the far-reaching impact of transformative projects like Hope Springs, a nationally celebrated development redefining what inclusive, community-focused affordable housing can achieve. Through bold partnerships and visionary leadership, Habitat is rewriting the rules of housing equity.
This episode is a powerful testament to what’s possible when vision meets action—proving we’re not just building houses, we’re building futures.
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Pat:
Hi, I'm Pat Benincasa, and welcome back to Fill To Capacity. Today, Episode Number 89. "Hammers, Hearts, and Hope: A Housing Revolution." Okay, I love finding people who are true change makers with a vision, and Cheri Witt-Brown is exactly that. From picking up nails on construction sites as a little girl. to leading Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity in Colorado.
Pat:
Cheri's story is one of passion and purpose. She's taken habitat to incredible heights, creating innovative housing solutions, and building hope for families and communities. She's a builder in every sense of the word, and I can't wait for you to hear how she and Greeley-Weld Habitat for Humanity are transforming lives, one home at a time.
Pat:
Cheri, it is so nice to have you here.
Cheri:
Oh, Pat, I am thrilled to be here with you. Thank you so much for this opportunity to spend some time with you and your audience.
Pat:
Thank you. From the emails I've sent you, I have been so excited about this podcast. Okay, so Cheri, you started on construction sites at just three years old, picking up nails for a penny each.
Pat:
How did those early days with your dad spark your passion for building?
Cheri:
Oh, Pat, that's such an excellent question. I love to think about these times in my life. Oh, Pat. One of my earliest memories was being on a job site with my father, uh, and taking the bricks off of the job site and building little houses to put my water jug in.
Cheri:
In Colorado, it can get really hot in the summers, so my mom, back in those days, would put ice water in a mason jar. And my father would be on the job site sometimes for long periods of time. And of course a three year old is going to be a little bored, right? But my earliest memory of building something was taking bricks and building what looked to be a house structure.
Cheri:
And then I discovered that if I put my mason jar full of ice water in there, it would stay much cooler. Why, I could observe what my father was doing and who he was talking to , learn from their conversations and I sometimes can't believe my dad said that started at three years old.
Pat:
Yeah. Now he owned the company, right? He had owned a construction company.
Cheri:
Yes, he went to college in Greeley out of the Korean War on the VA bill and graduated in a record like three years’ time, went to work for a local lumberyard, but decided to start to build homes at the same time. And so I really literally don't remember much but the construction industry growing up and another fun story I like to tell we eventually moved up to Estes Park.
Cheri:
And my father and his business partner were taking myself to school one day. And they decided to stop at a job site on the way to school because unbeknownst to us, they were putting sticks of dynamite in a boulder. And they were going to blow up this boulder because the Rocky Mountain National Park is rocky, to prepare for a house they were building.
Cheri:
So, yeah, I had a pretty exciting childhood with learning about construction. We got to watch them just blow up a boulder, yes.
Pat:
Wow, it sounds like building is in your DNA. Oh,
Cheri:
Yes, yes.
Pat:
Okay, moving forward. After a successful career in the for-profit world, what made you take the leap into nonprofit work with Greely-Weld Habitat?
Pat:
I mean, was there a moment when you knew, oh yeah, this is what I gotta do?
Cheri:
Well, I wish I could tell you, Pat, this was a very intentional decision. In fact, in the private sector, when I had my general contracting company to design businesses, I used to donate product to Habitat, was very supportive of the affordable, healthy mission they had.
Cheri:
But when I retired from building custom homes, you have to imagine in a career that spanned over 25 years. Myself and my team had built over 450 custom homes from Glenwood Springs to Grand Junction. And when I retired, I thought I would never build another home again. I was finished, building custom homes is a very intense process and very personal.
Cheri:
And you really give yourself 100 and 100 100 percent over to your clients. So I thought I was just supposed to do nonprofit work. And pursued a career in local food mains, now where I have been volunteering at for a number of years, I really had a heart for poverty, especially poverty as a related to children.
Cheri:
And so most of my work centered around at that time being a school board member, president of the foundation. Just really trying to address the stresses of poverty, these lives, because I grew up what I thought a very privileged life, but I saw as, especially as I started to have children and raise a family, the inequities in the world that existed.
Cheri:
So upon retiring from private sector, general contracting and design, I went to work for a local food bank here in Greeley, moved over here, my daughters were attending college here, brought my husband and I back over to this side of the mountain, and Habitat here found out about my background. Uh oh.
Cheri:
And a year in after moving to [00:06:00] Greeley and starting to work at the food bank, they knocked on my door and offered me a position, and I was like, oh, no, I'm very happy at the food bank, I, I love what I'm doing. I'm a systems builder, so wherever I go, I want to build something. At that point in time, I was building a lot of internal systems for the food bank to help with efficiencies and food delivery and growing revenues.
Cheri:
That was very fulfilling. But, in 2013, there was a devastating flood that came through northern Colorado. It destroyed hundreds of housing units. It Especially affordable housing units in Northern Colorado. And so I saw this devastating flood and the impact was really to families who were already vulnerable.
Cheri:
And their home was completely wiped out. And so they had basically nowhere to go. Because of that, when Habitat did knock on my door the third year, I really felt compelled to do something about the loss of affordable housing. that I saw in Northern Colorado. And of course, I knew at that point that yes, I need to go to work for Habitat for Humanity.
Cheri:
I need to be a part of bringing much needed affordable housing that had been lost. But never did I understand how deep the need was, Pat, until I walked through the doors and spent my first couple of days here.
Pat:
Your story really strikes me that I think this has happened to many of us. We announced to the universe.
Pat:
Mm-hmm . Under no circumstances am I going to do that. The second we do that, the universe kind of says, oh, really? But what your story talks about is that you were flexible enough and also given the events of what was happening around you that you, you were flexible enough and your heart was elastic enough to say, well, maybe.
Pat:
Maybe never is a strong word.
Pat:
I love your story. And when I came across researching you and I saw how you evolved that you didn't just jump into this job. It just says a lot about you as well. So yeah, that was the other reason what I wanted you on here. Okay. I digress now. That's okay. Now, Cheri, housing has always been a cornerstone of the American dream. Yes, but lately we're seeing a shift that's raising eyebrows large corporations like Blackstone with 80 000 homes and Amherst owning tens of thousands more are buying up single family properties across the country with investors Now accounting for nearly 18 percent of all home purchases.
Pat:
I've got to ask you, how do you see this trend impacting families trying to break into home ownership and really the broader housing market?
Cheri:
Oh, that is one of the most heartbreaking evolutions I've seen in the realm of American housing. Pat, I'll go back to when I was a young woman in the banking business, brush out of college, 24 years old by 25, I was a branch manager, a tiny little Savings and loan branch.
Cheri:
I was able to build my first home, a single young woman, by myself for 52, 000 and make the mortgage payment back then women bankers didn't make a whole lot of money, but because of what you just described, that opportunity for young people has disappeared and unfortunately, when families are paying more than 50 percent in many cases, like 7 and 10 families nationwide of their pretax income to housing and much of that higher housing cost is exactly attributed to the lack of even affordable rentals.
Cheri:
To these investors buying up these properties, so I get back to, okay, now you have a young person or a family who is paying more than 50 percent of their pretax income, unlike when I was a young woman, and it didn't take me long 18 months to save up for that down payment. And back then, this is how old I am Pat, interest rates were, I think an FHA loan was 12. 5%.
Cheri:
Even with a high interest rate, I was still able to purchase a brand newly constructed home. And then as I became a builder, I've started to go back into the family business. My dad was, In the early days, entry level builder for entry level buyers. And so, as a young woman in college, I watched him build large developments where families could purchase their first home, again, not paying more than 50 percent of their pretax income, maybe 20%.
Cheri:
And so, unfortunately, the way the real estate market has escalated to the crisis point it is now, It is a number of factors. Yes. It's investment. It's the sheer cost of construction, the cost of land, government policies that have making that with zoning regulations, with building and construction regulations that have dramatically increased the cost of housing.
Cheri:
I want to go back to the point you make the American dream generational wealth. Was birthed in most families and homeowners regardless where they came from even if you go to redline districting that happened ,there was even certain families of certain races at least in one part of the city that could purchase a home But that has been annihilated
Pat:
Yeah, and for folks who don't know what redlining is will you explain?
Cheri:
Well redlining unfortunately was a very predatory lending practice that would You Basically only approved families for certain races in certain parts of city or the town that they lived in. And it really kept those home values more static and also, and unfortunately, a lot of times. affected the educational opportunities for the children.
Cheri:
There's a number of different outcomes by this practice that are very negative outcomes. I'm not the expert in redlining. But you know, I've seen the effects of it now, 40, 50, 60 years later. And it is something that I love about Habitat is we are reversing that discriminatory practice.
Pat:
Now, funny you should mention that. Here we go. When you took over Greeley-Weld Habitat, it was building a few homes a year. How did you turn it into the powerhouse it is today? How did you do that?
Cheri:
Wow, with a whole lot of help, whole lot of support from a community of visionaries. We were given an opportunity of a lifetime, Pat, honestly, what happened is when first coming to Greeley-Weld Habitat, I had a very brave and courageous visionary board, number one, that we sat down and we said, five homes a year Is not enough for the need. It's unacceptable. And so along with the leadership team and my board, we developed a strategic plan that was focused on dramatically increasing our capacity. Now I had the benefit of coming from the private sector and knowing that scale often as it is in the private sector.
Cheri:
Financially is the model that it can be sustainable, but scale in the world of habitat was at that point, at least. Very uncommon. There were no other models outside Houston. Habitat was doing some great work in this area. Some of the larger cities, they were coming to scale with housing products, but it really was a very intentional goal that we set.
Pat:
Wait, when you say, is it scale is what you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah. Scale is S C A L E.
Cheri:
So scale in our world means basically. Building five homes a year, you'll never, never bring in enough revenues from just building five homes a year to do more than five homes a year. And this gets pretty complex, so let me try to break it down of how we went from five homes a year to this year, 50, right?
Cheri:
We're going to put. 50 families in the largest habitat community in the West. We recently developed 42 acres, and I'll talk more about Hope Springs in a minute. I have a special set of questions. Okay, good. But how we went from there, we did it, I wish I could tell you we did it overnight, but it was very sequential.
Cheri:
So, we started with the goal of, okay, we'll take down enough land to build 14 homes. And we're going to promise to build those 14 homes in two years. So that basically we were able to do that. We got to seven homes a year. And then we were offered an opportunity through the state of Colorado. And this is where partnerships are crucially important to this housing affordability solution.
Cheri: No one person, no one affiliate, Habitat affiliate is going to reach this pinnacle on their own. So, it takes a number of partnerships to make this happen. But the state of Colorado had what we call disaster relief money from that. Remember me talking about the 2013 flood? They were in danger of having to send back to HUD because a lot of other housing nonprofits hadn't been able to deploy that money and get homes built.
Pat:
Before you go any further, I have international listeners. HUD is the Housing Urban Development, and it's an arm of the American government.
Cheri:
Yeah, okay. And so HUD does deploy significant resources to help build affordable housing units in America. And disaster relief money is really intent for units to pop in quickly, right? It's not meant to, oh, it's going to take you five years to get this project done. They want to see that money deployed. They want to see those units coming up in 18 months or so. And to take a piece of land through entitlements with the government, raise the funding to just do what we call the civil infrastructure, and then get the vertical units built in that time is almost an impossibility.
Cheri:
But we developed a plan along with a private sector, what we call LIHTC, and LIHTC is an acronym for Low Income Housing Tax Credit, uh, developer, builder, and long-term operator commonwealth companies to put 95, 000 units on 12 acres and get that done in under 2 years. So, this is like the world of affordable housing, this is all, it is an impossibility.
Cheri:
Well, yeah! But, because we had so many people believing and coming alongside of us, and the state said we had to apply for this funding, we had to show that we had a plan that we could get this done, and they were gracious enough on the home ownership side to give us a couple extra years because we It just takes longer to build homes than it does apartments or townhomes or condos.
Cheri:
Believe it or not, Pat, we were able to deliver this large scale 95-unit co- developed project in the community of Evans that replaced half of the units lost in the 2013 flood. So we start to create what I call an army of believers in this vision because we had a win, we had a win to point that you get government working together, you get the private sector working together, you get nonprofit working together, and all coming to the table to be able to streamline affordable housing developments.
Cheri:
And then help fund those developments and then in Habitat, we have a self-funding mechanism revenue stream that comes in through the sell of our mortgages, which makes it even more sustainable. So, we basically crack the nut. We were able to come with a financial model. That we knew by going to scale that we could build communities of scale that were self-sufficient and sustainable.
Cheri:
And so we took that same model and then applied it with the next development, which is now known as Hope Springs. And that was much more grand, right? That was quadrupling our goal, not just doubling it. We said, if we're going to do this, let's create something that we know will this organization for the next hundred years.
Pat:
That's where I'm going with my next question. Before I go into that, what is so remarkable about this? In the last, what, 10 years or so, we've lived in a time of uncivil discourse, polarization, people taking sides. And what you've just talked about, Cheri, Is city, state, government, private entities, nonprofits coming together?
Pat:
That is truly, well it's refreshing, and remarkable.
Cheri:
I don't think we even realized it, Pat, until We were standing at the ground opening blessing of Hope Springs on a kind of chilly October morning, and in the hundreds of attendees that day, we had everyone from every side of the aisle.
Cheri:
We had environmentalists, we had climate change activists. We had every political spectrum that you can imagine, and then every demographic of our city represented. It was such an eye-opening experience at that point to realize because we're so focused on the goal. We're just like, we're here to talk to you about this project and set aside what corporation you are, what your corporation does.
Cheri:
What government position you hold, what political party you belong to, who you are, none of that mattered to us. But then, that morning, as we're up there, and U. S. Senator Hickenlooper says, this is the way the world should be, is that everyone should come together. When there are difficult societal problems in play, this is the way it should look like, that we come together to solve them.
Cheri:
And then you have Dick Monfort, the owner of the Colorado Rockies, who would be on political opposites of Senator Hickenlooper, coming up and saying the exact same thing at that groundless meeting. This is the way the world should operate, is coming together to solve problems. These difficult problems we have in our communities and so I think you're right.
Cheri:
You've hit on that. That is one of the most profound things this development model has achieved is bridge building in ways We never would have thought possible.
Pat:
Yeah, and what I love is that what you've just outlined is when we're at our best Yes, when we're truly at our best when we put aside those differences And see something like this happening Which is Hope Springs.
Pat:
And I'm going to ask you, what is Hope Springs? Why is it such a transformative project? Tell us about it, and what kind of impact have you seen because of this project on families and the communities it serves?
Cheri:
Well, Hope Springs, to what you just said, it is such a shining example of the good that can be accomplished when we focus on making the world a little better for everyone.
Cheri:
And one of the things I love about Habitat's Vision is that everyone deserves a decent place to live. And so Hope Springs, along with our other communities, that the goal was to design a community that was really designed by the community for the community. So, first of all, we had to think of who's going to live there.
Cheri:
What kind of community do the eventual homeowners that will. purchase a home at Hope Springs. What kind of community would they vision and want to live in? Having such an intimate relationship, another thing I love about Habitat, we develop such intimate relationships with our homeowners. We go to their children's graduation.
Cheri:
We have dinners in their homes. We start to learn about their cultures. We start to learn about their dreams and their hopes and their goals. I love the name because it really embodies this hope for our families, this hope for our communities. And hope is sometimes all that we have to hold on to. In order to make HOPE a reality, see, and that's the thing I think also that makes HOPE Springs so incredibly important is that these are difficult projects.
Cheri:
They're difficult to secure the capital stacks. If they weren't, everybody would be doing this. Everybody would be building HOPE Springs. My dad was doing these right and left back in the 70s, but it's difficult to find land and Expensive in Colorado, water can cost you more than the land. It often was looked upon as almost an impossibility in our world.
Cheri:
It just was something that you didn't see much of, but because of the success we had with Mission Springs and because we truly knew we had developed a community. Model that not only the end buyer, the homeowners who would be living there, but our general community at large would benefit from workforce stabilization.
Cheri:
One of the stresses on communities is nobody can afford to live anywhere in Colorado anymore. Yeah, many of our cities are like that. Workforce is moving out. And so, cities are losing employees. So one of the things we knew for a fact is when you have affordable housing, there's less turnover in your workforce.
Cheri:
There are better test scores for your children in your schools, there's better health for the family overall, and then there's economic upward mobility. So we made this case of why Hope Springs is a good investment. We took our case to the people, right? We said, all of these benefits will happen if you help us build a project of this scope and size for our community.
Cheri:
And we were able to demonstrate that through years of research of habitat families and the successes that they have. So this isn't just an unproven pipe dream. There's a lot of research that goes on, home ownership. It changes the trajectory of the family's lives and generations thereafter. We had volumes of research and data that supported why this development should happen.
Pat:
Let me ask you, okay, Hope Springs, how big, how many units? And the type of housing, are they single family, dwellings, what did you do at Hope Springs concretely?
Pat:
Okay, let me just give you a brief overview of Hope Springs, okay. Hope Springs is a 42-acre infill city development, so it's in the city of Greeley's limits. 42 acres, and frankly, I started developing a piece of land to the west of what Hope Springs now sits on. And this is one of the many miracles, Pat, embedded in this project. It was right before COVID. I was going to purchase; my board director gave me the green light to put an LOI on a piece of property.
Cheri:
Letter of an intent. Like an offer to purchase. But in the world of government funding, you can't put a contract. You have to do all these due diligences. But this is what I call one of the first many miracles of Hope Springs, but there was some limiting aspects of that piece of property that was making developing it become very, very difficult.
Cheri:
In the meantime, I went to the property owners of where Hope Springs sits now, the 42 acres, and it's a long way to answer your question, but I asked them if they would share the cost of a 1. 5 million sewer lip that we would need to install. As part of the civil improvements. I'm going to fast forward to the point after a series of months, the pandemic hit, I pulled that letter of intent offer from the other property, because it was just getting too difficult, and in the meantime, the owners of the property that Hope Springs now sits on came to me and together they basically said, hey, let's move your project over to our parcel and we'll be your multifamily developers come alongside with us.
Cheri:
So that's kind of how we got to the 42 acres and then eventually we visioned out 174 habitat homes, and that is a mix of 150 what we call paired homes. The old name for it used to be called duplexes .
Cheri:
And then 20 single families. I later learned from Habitat International, what eventually would be the largest habitat community in the western region. It doesn't stop there. In addition to that, there is 320 multifamily units. That will be built that will be affordable as well So the 320 will help stop the bleed we went back to your rental question What do we do?
Cheri:
How do these families pay so much in rent and save up what they need to become financially secure? So we stop the bleed right with the 320 because not everybody is always ready for home ownership But it doesn't stop there. Then we decided, of course, our families need a child care center on the property that they have that is affordable.
Cheri:
So we brought in a private sector child care provider who is going to be building a state of the art child care center there. And it still doesn't stop there. We also, in partnership with our families, Develop recreation areas. And many of our families come from all over the world, as far away as Kenya, Miramar, Peru, Mexico, from everywhere.
Cheri:
Like I said, 70 different languages spoken in our school district. And so we were very intentional about designing recreational facilities] that, that children could look at, which happened to turn out to too many pitch soccer or football, depending on what country you come from. That are lit at night, and so a child coming from anywhere, from any country, knows what to do on a soccer field.
Cheri:
And they're called mini pitch fields. They're, kind of an evolution from soccer. They can be flooded in the winter, turned into ice skating, or hockey. They're super sweet. And then next to that is a nature discovery park. That has an homage to Greeley's agricultural roots, like a farm pump. But how do families get their water in other parts of the country?
Cheri:
Looks like an agricultural farm pump, right? So many of our early farmers used and early families used to get their water. So there's some history in there. There are fossils embedded in the ground covering so that children are very interactively, intellectually engaged. But yet, again, any family coming from any country, a child doesn't have to look at a piece of equipment and go, what'd I do?
Cheri:
They know how to play on rocks, they know how to find things in the dirt, and then what, Furthermore, makes this even cooler is that even children with physical disabilities can roll a wheelchair into any of these play spaces.
Cheri:
Even my most creative days, I was thinking back to this. Some of this was so inspired beyond me that I threw my assistant, I want this nature park. I don't really know what exact, I've seen some examples. But. I gave it to him to lead that work and he rocked it.
Cheri:
So he came back with all the concepts and then there's another piece to the recreational areas. There's like this big shade structure that has solar that will feed all the light. And so this will be a lit play area at night, which often, again, is. It's something that we don't see in cities. And next to that is organic gardens as large as an acre where families can grow whatever kind of food that they grew in their own countries.
Cheri:
So often when families come here to America, they're stuck with whatever we sell in our grocery stores. And let's say live in an urban city, especially in a rural, more rural area, agricultural area like ours. And it wasn't until I was invited a few years back to a family celebration from a family from Miramar that.
Cheri:
They were eating these delicious vegetables, and she proudly showed me her garden in the back, and I was like, I've never seen these vegetables before, and so when I say a community designed by the community, for the community, this is what I'm talking about. And so those are some of the embedded amenities.
Cheri:
Along with biking, walking paths, walking to grocery, Walmart sets a five- minute walk right behind the development, behind a berm. The highest performing K 8 charter school sets right behind Hope Springs. When we talk about a five-minute city, a five-minute community, this truly is one. And so this is why Hope Springs has, I think, garnered as much national attention as it has, is because we're building a community that I want to live in.
Cheri:
You want to live in or dispelling not my backyard development. I don't want affordable housing in my backyard. That mindset and Pat, it was so successful because when people in the community saw the vision, they saw the plans for the development. And they really understood that the multitude of thoughtful layers embedded in this development.
Cheri:
It was a much easier investment. A U. S. Senator could look at this and say yeah, I'll approve a 2. 5 million Congressional District Spending Award to help seed this project. The owners of the property ultimately donated all the land and water, 8. 8 million, and then came the rest of the funding, state funding, corporate funding, partners, and A miracle happened in a sense that we went into now what we call vertical.
Cheri:
We were able to build what we call the horizontal or civil construction that's putting all sewer, water, electric, roads, sidewalks, all the infrastructure needed, right under 65 days, 42 acres. Presently of the 174 homes, we have 29 under construction.
Cheri:
Not even a year ago, there was heavy equipment all over this. So I tell other Habitat affiliates and other housing developers who are trying to scale projects like this. The really important thing is you have to have these thoughtful community developments, right? Yeah.
Pat:
You know, what you're really talking about. Hope Springs is a prototype of possibility for anywhere in this country. It is so self-contained and so visionary on all aspects of all levels from sewers to daycare to It just seems like something that could be adapted to just about any state in the Union.
Cheri:
It is right now, Pat. Back in 2022, I presented Hope Springs, the community development model, before it was even completely funded or built, right? It was still just kind of a dream. We were still amassing the capital. At our international conference, 1, 100 affiliates, 70 countries. And I was told we had the highest attendance session there.
Cheri:
Fast forward two years and spoke at the opening planning area with the panel, with Jonathan Reckford, the CEO of Habitat For Humanity. After we got done with that panel discussion, so many different affiliates came up to me and said, we attended your session two years ago, and now we have a 20-home development underway, or someone else would say, we're working on ours, and it's happening across the nation.This truly can be replicated anywhere.
Pat:
Cheri, do you have enough hours in the day? No. I
don't think you do because your passion, I don't even know how the hell you sleep at night because your brain is probably thinking, oh, we could do this and then we could do that. I mean, really, it's such a wonderful job you have.
Cheri:
Oh, it is. It's a labor of love. I'm honestly at the age, Pat, where A lot of my friends are fully retired now, and I just think how blessed I am to be able to work with, and it's not just me, it takes hundreds of people to buy in.
Pat:
That's the whole thing. I mean, since you started talking, you're always talking about people coming together. Something of this scale cannot happen unless people put aside their differences to make this happen. Now, you talk about something called continuum of affordable housing model. What is the continuum of affordable housing.
Pat: What is it? Like, how does it work?
Cheri:
Well, it's a large continuum. From one point to another, Pat, because really what we're talking about, all the way from people experiencing homelessness and how do we help them stabilize, how do we help them get out of the cycle of finding themselves on the streets or living in their car with their children are some of the heartbreaking things that we see. In our cities, in our towns, so that continuum goes all the way from those experiencing homelessness to stable housing, which is what we're providing, that long term housing. But really a healthy community has all the continuum of housing all the way up to luxury, right?
Cheri:
A family coming out of homelessness is not going to go straight into home ownership. Most often now we have a few. Yeah, those are the ones. I can tell you the story of Luz and her five girls that were living in her van, and she was in housekeeping at the Hampton Inn here, and Two girls were still headed to college while they were living in her van and she was approved for our program.
Cheri:
And right before the pandemic, she moved into the home she built with her daughters with the help of her older daughters and this community. So, I've seen everything happen, but that continuum of housing the most vulnerable, which Habitat really focuses on those in our community that have no hope of home-ownership outside of Habitat.
Cheri:
We truly are their only hope. That is why I am such a believer and so passionate about the Habitat model. It's because it is the way to earn their way out of generational poverty. I have people ask me, oh, you give houses away. I said, oh, no, we don't give houses away. Our families work hard for the opportunity.
Cheri:
They get a credit score that will help them qualify for a mortgage loan that they'll never pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income towards their housing. So that works for everybody, no matter how and that their children can thrive in that stability of their home. Here's the thing.
Cheri:
When you are supporting Habitat for Humanity across the world, the families then have that opportunity to break out of generational poverty. Not just for that generation, but for all the future generations. Yes. Just like the old days. When the American Dream and the soldiers were coming home from World War II and they built a lot of housing, throughout the nation, guess what?
Cheri:
Highest percentage of them went on to be the wealth creators for their families, right? So why I was able to go to college. There again, it's bringing back that American opportunity of wealth creation through homeownership, but that continuum, I'll go back to that. It takes a while sometimes to get there.
Cheri:
There's different steps that families have to take in order to be ready and successful in homeownership. So those housing opportunities in the same development that provide that lower rental product. But still in a quality community. Yes, it goes to the same child care center. Their families grow gardens They play together. They go to the same school. They shop at the same grocery store It is truly community as we used to know it.
Pat:
It sure sounds like that The heart and soul of Habitat are volunteers. And I have this image of Habitat being this giant magnet, and it pulls in, investors, private sources, and people who call you and say, Hey, I'd like to work for a week or two on this project, or how can I help?
Pat:
How is it that you can do that? You survive on these volunteers. Is it hard to keep that going?
Cheri:
Really, the model that we've developed, Pat, is a hybrid. We have some habitat homes that are built by volunteers, just like our traditional model. But when you ask, how did you develop this model that went from five to seven homes a year?
Cheri:
We had one of the most experienced habitat builders in the country working with us. A degreed engineer out of Texas A& M back in 1987 decided to dedicate his life to building habitat homes. He came here to Greeley several years ago, and even he with a team of highly trained volunteers, community volunteers, AmeriCorps, what we see in most cases, volunteer driven habitat communities, the max you can build is usually 15 to 20, and our volunteers are still incredibly important because we want that opportunity for families to be able to build, even if it's not their home, somebody else's, community.
Cheri:
The volunteers to come alongside the habitat families, learn about their lives, learn about their cultures, learn about their trials, learn about their successes, all of that happens in the environment of building a habitat home. We also created as career technical educational program or underserved youth, underperforming youth in our community, come out on site and build habitat homes while incorporating core curriculum requirements for graduation.
Cheri:
And get dual college credit . That's been an astounding success. But even if we have all of these volunteers coming out, which we love and appreciate We also knew that how we get it to scale is bringing in private sector production builders who can add to that volume.
Cheri:
And so we have a hybrid model, which more and more habitats will be going to, in the future. Because that's, frankly, 20 homes a year still] isn't cutting it. Still hardly making a dent. 50 homes a year, we're starting to push the needle. Then we're starting to see real progress.
Pat:
Okay. I got to stop you here because You just walked into my next question You have a a favorite quote, which I love quote: "Success is achieved if failure is unacceptable."
Pat:
Cheri. It's bold and I gotta say a little fierce Do you approach every challenge with this mindset? Is there a story about how this quote became your mantra?
Cheri:
Well, I stole that from Apollo 13, right? It's that idea that no matter how difficult the mission is, And boy, it's difficult some days.
Cheri:
Failure is, and failure can be interpreted, interpreted like so many different ways. But no, I mean, we often, as a team, we tackle the most difficult problems, unsurmountable problems. The way that I look at the inspiration comes from And why that, I believe in that quote so much, comes from the families we serve.
Cheri:
Yeah. I see them persevere out of circumstances, environments. Think about Sudanese families who have immigrated here and what they have gone through. And when I look at them and I see that they have persevered through every obstacle under this time. And they have made it these problems are not insurmountable And failure not an option.
Cheri:
It's never going to be an option because really in it's in our failures It's where we learn the most. It's in the life lessons of where sometimes we think it's the perception of what a failure is. That's number one, is often things that we would label as failures really are not failures.
Cheri:
They are just the impetus for us to learn, but how much, how many times did Einstein fail? Look at it that way. How many times did one experiment not go off as he hypothesized? And so, I, I mean that quote really is birthed out of that idea that we learn from every single situation. We took a step back for a minute, we had to reevaluate, but then we came up with a workaround, right?
Cheri:
We came up with an innovation that allowed us to run over that obstacle. I mean, sometimes you literally run them over.
Cheri:
One of my newest quotes that I have right now, I will tell you, Pat, is " We're all faced with a series of great opportunities, brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
Pat:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, I suspect you're like this too, but if you tell me why something can't be done, and if you give me 10 really good reasons, to me that's waving a red flag and I'm going to do it.
Pat:
And the more, the more people tell you why it can't be done. I think to myself, yeah, yeah. Keep talking. I'm going to go back in the studio and I'm going to do it. So, there's some of us that when you say no, it opens the floodgates of creativity. Problem solving and knowing, it's just knowing that this can be done and because it hasn't been done before all that means there's no owner's manual. So you write the damn owner's manual.
Cheri:
That's right. Exactly. That's what I love about Hope Springs. There truly is a community development. . There's a manual here. Now you have it. Yeah. Anybody can use it, like anybody and I love when we can deliver to the world, and I'm with you on that. It's just like, yeah, you know what? There is always a way.
Pat:
You talked about the Career Technical Education initiative What makes that so important to you. What is it?
Cheri:
When I had my own children, got involved in the school district as a school board member, and we were looking at student achievement and watching 50 percent of our children fall through the cracks, in the school system.
Cheri:
I don't care what school district you're in, especially back then, big push was college, college, college. And my own daughters didn't have a choice. My youngest one wanted to be a realtor. I said, well, you'll be a realtor with a college degree. But I am saying in this case, there are so many students that are incredibly intelligent, just what we're talking about.
Cheri:
And frankly, have, life circumstances that put more stress on their educational ability to achieve. The CTE program was really born from something that I personally put into practice in my private sector business of looking at some of my daughter's friends who I knew were bright, but they were on the verge of dropping out.
Cheri:
And so saying, Hey, come work for me. Let's find a way to get you through high school. And some of those students went on to be subcontractors. One went on to be a superintendent for us. Incredibly successful. Well, when I came to Habitat, I was so fortunate to have an opportunity to meet a group of students from the east side of Greeley.
Cheri:
Anybody in Greeley or Colorado knows that the east side of Greeley is a tough part. There's neighborhoods of poverty. Unfortunately, poverty drives crime levels up, right? Just all the stresses you find. I was out with this group of students from the east side of Greeley, and I saw lights in their eyes.
Cheri:
I believe that if we develop this program that allows students to come build habitat homes and incorporate their core curriculum requirements for graduation. So, what's physics but dimensional lumber?
Cheri:
Geometry and construction. There is science. What makes the soil collapsible rather than expansible? And so integrating these educational curriculum into the process of building habitat homes. Little did I know. I knew there would be all these side benefits to the students. Having children and students in poverty upon graduation, being able to get hired at 35 an hour versus 12 or 15 at McDonald's.
Cheri:
I was more business driven, so I was thinking more of like, okay, we get them here, we get them graduated, they get some dual college credit, then they have a pathway to a higher paying career. From there, they can do whatever they want.
Cheri:
But what happened was magical Pat, which I'll never forget the first group of students on site, and it's talk about this is almost like taking military enlistment that is coming from a real rough part of the city. And what the sergeant might have looked at and said what am I going to do with these group of soldiers, but seeing the potential and knowing what the proper training with the proper opportunity that they could achieve great things.
Cheri:
And that first group of students set the tone for all the classes this past nine years, 500 students. At school that had a 46 percent graduation rate, we still boast a hundred percent.
Cheri:
Student attendance went from on average with this population, 37 percent to 87%. Students who thought they would never be academically successful, maybe never even graduate, earning dual college credit. So those are just some of the intentional outcomes we were seeking.
Cheri:
I've had students whose parents were, unfortunately, out there raising, trying to help provide for a two-year-old, younger sibling. Working at the movie theater at night, but still showing up on the job site.
Cheri: Those are the true heroes.
Pat:
Cheri, in some of your interviews, you talked about the magic of handing families the keys to their new home. It's a life changing moment. Now, this is going to be a hard question for you to answer. Is there one story that stands out, that's etched in your heart, that you will never forget, that just drives this passion for your work?
Cheri:
Yeah, I will tell you the first one that comes to my mind is Chela. Chela immigrated here from Peru and when she came with her husband at the time, and then she got to America and her husband immediately left her. And so she was all alone. She was pregnant at the time, and she did all the hard work, and it turned out her young daughter, also a delightful young girl now, but she was born with Down syndrome.
Cheri:
Okay, so here Chella is, single mom, has a special needs child, is new to the country, and when she came into her office, They don't have to say a word. You can just see the pain, the despair. I see so many families walk into our office, and you see that they're almost prepared for us to say, no, we can't help you.
Cheri:
When I look at what she has overcome, and by the time we got to know Adriana, Adriana now is probably, 12 now, but at that time she was 5. And when we were able to hand her the keys to that home and to just see not only the look in her eyes, but in Adriana's eyes, and know that, how that Everything she had been through, it couldn't be erased, but it could be softened, and then it turned her eyes to the future from the past.
Cheri:
That's the other thing that I see. It's like, all of a sudden, the pain, and the suffering, and the courage that they have, to get where they are, it turns their eyes to the future. That's the best part of what we do, is that, knowing that is forever. That's not something that can be taken away from her.
Cheri:
And one of the things I'm so proud about this affiliate, one foreclosure in 37 years. Wow. One in 37 years. I can't take credit for all that. I give that to the team that's been here, like the, our CFO and our family selection director have been here for over 20 years. But those two women have prepared every single family for success.
Cheri:
We've had families that have had cancer, and we have the pandemic and we've had all those things we've come alongside of them and helped walk them through those times of difficulty. So I know if Chella runs into problems in the future, this team will be here to walk her through those battles if they would come again.
Cheri:
So I guess she's one that stands out. There's a lot.
Pat:
As we get to the end of this podcast, sadly, Cheri, your passion is a catalyst and combined with Habitat for Humanity's incredible mission and the dedication of volunteers, together, you all have created a force for change that is transforming lives and entire communities.
What all of you are doing is proof of what's possible when vision and action come together. Thank you so much for sharing this remarkable story and stories.
Cheri:
Oh, thank you, Pat. I thank you for the opportunity. I love sharing the stories of the people that make it happen. I just think this world is much better than we think it is.
Cheri:
There's so much good, and I think at Habitat we see the best of the best. Like you point out, the volunteers, I think of even our board, the people that maybe don't swing hammers or come on site there, they still are advocating for strangers that they may never meet.
Cheri:
Like I said, it's a true honor and blessing to be involved in the work of Habitat for Humanity. Outside of my children, family, I count it the greatest story of my life. So thank you for letting me spend some time with you.
Pat: It's my honor to have you here. So, if you enjoyed today's podcast, please tell your friends, and subscribe. Thank you so much. : Bye.
