Habitat of Lee and Hendry CEO Becky Lucas at the Blueprints of the Future event at Clive Daniel Home.
On Feb. 4, Clive Daniel Home hosted Habitat for Humanity’s “Blueprints of the Future” event. The night was an inside look into the future of Habitat, in turn making the night about the future of our community in Lee and Hendry Counties.
Habitat CEO Becky Lucas began by sharing Habitat’s mission of bringing people together by building homes, communities, and hope.
“If you know me, you know I am continually inspired by the families we serve, so I want to share something with you to frame our conversation and ground us in why we do this work,” Becky said. “When a family applies for the affordable homeownership program, many times they write a letter to accompany the application. I have read hundreds and hundreds of letters, but the one in my hand that we received last year affected me more than any other.”
That letter was written by Habitat Homeowner Shayla, who wrote a four-page letter when she applied to Habitat. That letter was titled “It’s Now or Never.”
“The reason I called it now or never is because if you don’t ever get started, you will never accomplish anything,” Shayla said. “Even if you fail, you have to start.”
In her letter, Shayla wrote about her challenging living conditions and her commitment to providing a better life for her children.
“It was very chaotic,” Shayla said. “Where we lived, it was lot of fights. It was a lot of shootings. A lot of bugs, mold; just wasn’t the proper place to raise children. If you are there so long, you become a product of your environment. I didn’t want that for my kids.”
Habitat Homeowner Shayla at her home dedication.
Shayla’s story is a reminder that Habitat is a hand up, not a handout. It’s a reminder that Habitat is here for those who do everything they can, and it’s still not enough.
“Her struggle wasn’t because she didn’t work hard enough,” Becky said. “It wasn’t because she didn’t try. It was because she lacked a path to a better life for herself and her children. Affordable housing means spending no more than 30% of your income on housing costs. When families can’t find that path, the impact ripples through every part of their lives.”
Currently, a worker needs to earn $67K a year to afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment in Lee County. Additionally, there are only 24 affordable rental units for every 100 low-income earning families across Florida.
It’s Habitat’s mission to change that through services such as home repair, housing counseling and affordable homeownership. Through these combined efforts, Habitat impacted over 5,800 local families, with Shayla’s being one of them.
“My mom always said, ‘If you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got,’” Shayla recalled. “I had to change a lot of things. Then, I seen doors opening for me, and Habitat happened to be one of those doors to opened for me.”
However, despite the thousands of families that we’ve assisted, we still have eight to ten families walking through our doors every day seeking housing assistance. “But just like Shayla had her “now or never” moment, we have ours,” Becky said.
Habitat was awarded a $50 million Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery grant. We plan to use these funds for a total of five projects, including 44 homes near the Veterans Hospital, 26 homes near Dunbar High School, 14 scattered sites in Cape Coral, finishing our McNeill community and 106 homes in our beloved Heritage Heights neighborhood.
However, homes, including site work and infrastructure, must be completed before we can draw from the grant funds.
This task, on top of acquiring our forever home, currently under contract on MLK Boulevard, is a priority for us to continue work that will be transformational for the future of our organization, the families we serve, and the greater community.
As we look to the future, we celebrate the successes and triumphs of all the families we have served and look forward to the families we can serve as we reach our goals with your help.
“When I started this program, my relationship with God got stronger,” Shayla said. “This is the beginning of my story.”
