Jonathan Reckford with President Jimmy Carter

I feel privileged and honored to kick off this season by introducing today’s guest, a leader in the service arena, Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity International and author of Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues that Will Change Your Life. Habitat for Humanity began in the 1970s as a grassroots effort on a community farm in southern Georgia. The housing organization has since grown to become a leading global nonprofit working in local communities across all 50 states in the U.S. and in more than 70 countries. Habitat has helped more than 29 million people gain access to new or improved housing.

Jonathan has served as CEO of Habitat since 2005. Under his leadership, the organization has grown from serving 125,000 individuals per year to more than 8.7 million people in 2018 alone.

A Life that Matters

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ above, or on the following podcast platforms:

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The following is a taste of my conversation with Jonathan:

Q: President and Mrs. Carter have been deeply involved with Habitat for over 35 years. Would you share with our listeners a bit about the Carters’ role in the organization and particularly about the Carter Work Project?

Jonathan: It is funny that often we are best known forsomething that turns out not to be true. President and Mrs. Carter did not actually start Habitat, though there’s no question they put it on the map and are our most famous volunteers and have been quite a great inspiration to me and so many others.

Q: Would you tell our listeners a bit about your personal journey that led you to Habitat for Humanity?

Jonathan: My grandmother, Millicent Fenwick was a kind of towering figure in my life. When we were young, she’d give us that look and ask us what we were going to do to be useful. And that was sort of her view of life. We’re all supposed to be useful.

Q: Given the Christian roots of Habitat for Humanity, was there ever push-back about your broad level of inclusiveness?

Jonathan: We have a phrase that was not original of me, but I’ve adopted, and love is that God is our center but not our border.

Q: Based on your experience, what is it about service that makes it the wellspring of the other six virtues that you describe in your book Our Better Angels?

Jonathan: You know, to me, service is so fundamental because it takes us out of ourselves.

When asked if there’s one last thing he’d like our listeners to hear, Jonathan says, “I would ask your listeners is think about all the people out there who just could make our world so much better if they had a chance, if they could just have the opportunity to grow into all that God intended for their lives.”

About Jonathan:

Jonathan Reckford is the chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity International and author of Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change Your Life and the World. Prior to joining Habitat in 2005, Jonathan served in various leadership positions from Wall Street to a local church in Minnesota. Under his leadership, Habitat has grown from serving 125,000 individuals per year to helping more than 7 million people last year alone build strength, stability and independence through shelter.

Habitat for Humanity began in the 1970s as a grassroots effort on a community farm in southern Georgia. The Christian housing organization has since grown to become a leading global nonprofit working in local communities across all 50 states in the U.S. and in more than 70 countries. Since its founding, Habitat has helped more than 29 million people gain access to new or improved housing.

Find Jonathan on Social Media:

https://www.habitat.org/about/habitat-for-humanity-leadership/ceo (Website)

https://twitter.com/JReckford (Twitter)

https://www.instagram.com/jreckford/ (Instagram)

Jonathan’s Book:

Our Better Angels: Seven Simple Virtues That Will Change Your Life and the World

Book Mentioned in the Interview:

Nothing Bad Between Us: A Mennonite Missionary’s Daughter Finds Healing in Her Brokenness, by Marlena Fiol, which is now available for pre-order.

About Marlena Fiol:
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters.

 Find Marlena Fiol on Social Media:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn

Podcast Transcript:

Welcome, Jonathan. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me.

Jonathan: Thank you, Marlena. And thanks for that kind introduction. It’s great to be with you.

Marlena: Jonathan, I’m sure all of our listeners know about Habitat for Humanity. But still, I think there might be some misconceptions out there. Like President Jimmy Carter was not the founder. So I’d like to begin by asking you to briefly describe Habitat and the vision and mission of the organization.

Jonathan: Thank you. It is funny that often we are best known for two things that turn out not to be true. One, that President and Mrs. Carter did not actually start Habitat, though there’s no question they put it on the map and are our most famous volunteers and have been quite a great inspiration to me and so many others.

The second biggest misconception is that Habitat gives away houses. And I think that the deep heart of the Habitat model is the idea of partnership. And from the very beginning it came with this idea that it would bring people together across all kinds of barriers to build decent housing. And in that idea of partnership there are three requirements for a family in our traditional model.

First, they have to be in need. So we serve families that the market wouldn’t traditionally lend to, from an income perspective. Second, they have to partner and that means putting in what we call sweat equity. So literally helping build their homes and their neighbors’ homes and putting in hundreds of hours of participating the process along with taking classes in financial management and home maintenance. So they’re really well prepared.

And then third is the ability to have clean credit and payback in affordable mortgage. And we recycle those payments in the community helping the next family have their opportunity for safeties and housing. And so I think at the principle that idea of partnership has been what has made Habitat so powerful. And I think so many people came to Habitat, as I did, with a volunteer experience where that opportunity to come out and work alongside all kinds of people and alongside the families gives you such a sense of community that is so rare in our world today, that I think I kept coming back and so many others have as well.

And one of our more famous volunteers said it really beautifully. Said, “Habitat for Humanity is a perpetual motion miracle. Everyone who gives receives and everyone who receives gives.” If you wanna stay complacent and uninspired, stay away from Habitat.” And I’m close to Habitat and it will change you and make you a part of changing the world. And I love that image because I think at heart that’s what service really is all about.

Marlena: Yeah, yeah. So, President and Mrs. Carter, as you said, have been deeply involved with Habitat for over 35 years. Would you share with our listeners a bit about the Carters’ role in the organization and particularly about the Carter Work Project?

Jonathan: President and Mrs. Carter are personal heroes of mine. Actually, today is their 74th wedding anniversary and I had to send them a note, and which is a pretty amazing thing. I don’t know anyone else who’s had a 74th wedding anniversary. So they are role models in many ways, but they… When the Carters’, as President Carter jokes, retired early to South Georgia after serving in the White House, Habitat had been founded in the next town over from Plains and Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat relentlessly pursued the Carters.

And there was a fateful event where they had done a little bit of volunteering locally in Georgia. But he, President Carter was in New York for a UN meeting and was jogging and he jogged by a Habitat build site in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and made a comment, and reporters were of course, following him along. And he said, “We need to come and do something about this.” That led to what turned into the first annual Jimmy Carter Work Project, which later became the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project.

And a busload of volunteers with the Carters came up from Plains, Georgia to New York City, slept in a church basement, and worked on rehabbing this five-story tenement building. And then came back the next year and did it again. And that became an annual tradition. And Habitat was a tiny organization. This was 1984 but the image of a former president of the United States sleeping in a church basement and literally doing the construction work just captured the media, and that really put Habitat on the map.

And then year by year in both in the U.S. and around the world, the Carter project really became a leadership development opportunity for new donors, board members, and really put Habitat on the map in those different countries. So you can really see the impact of the Carters all around the world in the leaders that were raised up in those different countries.

And so I’ve had the privilege now of being part of 14 of those Carter builds and they’re some of my absolute personal highlights. But there is an incredible energy to every Habitat build, but when you then bring thousands of people together all at once to build a whole community or a whole neighborhood at once, it is an extraordinary thing.

And the Carters also have certainly been role models, spokespeople, and just I think exemplified. And so I think so many people when they hear Habitat, they think of President Carter, and that’s been a good thing for us.

Marlena: Yeah. So, Jonathan, I come from a Mennonite background and I can’t help but think about Mennonite collective barn raisings when you talk about those home building blitzes. Yeah, that’s great.

Jonathan: Very much so. And in fact, the Mennonites were active in the beginning of Koinonia Farm, which was the precursor in many ways to Habitat, where Habitat was born.

Marlena: Interesting. Interesting. So in the book, you described your search to do something that mattered before you landed at Habitat. Would you tell our listeners a bit about your personal journey that led you to Habitat?

Jonathan: You know, I often start by saying, I think God has a sense of humor. Sometimes our stories make so much more sense looking back than they do at the time. But I was blessed to have a, you know, a very happy upbringing. My father was a professor at the University of North Carolina. I grew up in Chapel Hill, which is a wonderful place to be a child. And I had a couple of powerful figures.

My mom was active in the civil rights movement. My parents cared deeply about issues of justice, but my mother’s mother, my grandmother, Millicent Fenwick was a kind of towering figure in my life. And she was one of the relatively few women in the U.S. Congress back in the ’70s and had an ironclad backbone and passion for both civil rights and human rights. And that was her main focus in Congress.

And virtually every time I saw her every summer and Christmas, she would, you know, sit us down, give us the look, quote, Micah 6:8, which was her life verse, and she would say, “What does the Lord require of you but to act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” And then she’d asked us what we were gonna do to be useful. And that was sort of her view of life. We’re all supposed to be useful.

And I didn’t know how to answer that for a very long time. But I think the seeds were planted. And I came out of college thinking I was gonna go to law school and go into politics because…and then I suddenly realized that I had no interest in being a lawyer, talked my way into a job on Wall Street, which was never originally part of my plan. It wasn’t the best fit for me.

And I’ll speed up the story, went off to kind of regain perspective and had an amazing year living in South Korea working on the Olympic Games for the ’88 Olympics in coaching the Korean rowing team. And in that process had a lot of time and space to think about what sort of life I wanted and came back from that. I went to business school with the idea of learning the skills in the private sector to eventually find a mission that was really the right fit or calling.

And back then only a couple of business schools believed that we needed professional management of nonprofits so that’s now a much more mainstream point of view. And I had a series of somewhat unexpected moves from Marriott to The Walt Disney Company, to Circuit City and Carmex, to then Best Buy. And eventually felt the timing was right. The company I’m working for was acquired actually by Best Buy. And I left and didn’t know what I was gonna do next, which I usually advise people not to do, but went to Indiana short-term service trip.

And it was one of those another inflection points where I really had an overwhelming sense of shock serving in Uttar Pradesh, in Central India, serving with the Bhangi who among the Dalit are the sort of absolute lowest of the lowest among the caste system, and in rural areas literally only allowed to hand clean latrines and clean up dead animals, and not allowed to live in the community.

And these children at that time, about half the kids were dying before their 13th birthday and it just shattered me. And I didn’t know what I was gonna do but came back from that experience really with a sense of wanting to do something that impacted global poverty. And then having never really not had to look for a job since business school, suddenly all the door’s closed.

And I almost got a couple of big nonprofit jobs, but they wanted somebody who already run a non-profit. And to my great surprise, I ended up working for, being approached by my local church who asked if I would come and be essentially the administrative pastor or to manage the church and all the ministries to free up the senior pastor to be the spiritual leader and preacher.

And everyone I trusted for career advice, said, “Don’t do this. This is a really bad idea.” And that was daunting. But my wife and I prayed about it and had a strong sense that we were supposed to do this. And you know, it’s so interesting looking back because we did it really from a sense of obedience rather than just a preference, but it was a very rich time for our family.

Hopefully, I was able to really help this exploding church that had a huge heart for mission in Africa and in the Twin Cities where we were living. And then when I wasn’t looking two years later, Habitat came calling. And if I could have, you know, named one job that put everything together that I would have loved to be part of, it would have been Habitat for Humanity.

And in looking back, I think that the time working for the church was the perfect complement to my corporate leadership roles to be ready for Habitat, but that is… So it’s that was 15 years ago. And as you can tell I wasn’t very good at keeping a job. So this is record territory every additional day now. I’ve been here almost 15 years.

Marlena: Yeah, it’s a perfect coming together of the paths that you’ve described. You talk about your calling or have written about your calling as a combination of passion and purpose, ability, and mission. There seems to be such a longing for that kind of meaningful work in our world today.

I recently wrote a blog about finding our calling and the results of a Gallup poll that over 80% of college-educated Americans aspire to have meaningful work but less than 50% actually attain it. So I’m wondering based on your experience, why are so many people desiring but not finding a meaningful calling?

Jonathan: You know, it’s so complex. I think there are, you know, life circumstances. So sometimes we just have to do things to care for our families, to put food on the table too. So I think for some people their calling can be through their volunteer other work and they’re not able to do that through their primary job or occupation. I think sometimes it’s lack of self-awareness.

I know I have some friends for whom it became the golden handcuffs. They got trapped into a lifestyle that made it hard to switch but then, but they’re not doing work they truly loved or that really draws them. And so I think it’s a different set of answers. And I think to me, you can find it in different ways, but I think we’re all called to, you know, look… I often encourage young people to look for the problem that really tugs on their heart.

Clarence Jordan, who was the spiritual father of Habitat, started this interracial farm in 1942, talked about this idea of divine irritation that I write about in the book, which is that, you know, that spark that something really upsets you. And sometimes that’s a signal that you’re supposed to go do something about that or go make it better.

And my favorite definition of calling comes from theologian Frederick Buechner, who said, “Your purpose or your calling is that place where the deep gladness of your heart meets the world’s great need.” And I think that’s a nice image because it’s that intersection often that really turns into purpose and calling.

Marlena: Yeah, absolutely. So, Jonathan, you spoke earlier about the model of partnerships, particularly you talked about the sweat equity approach. But recently you’ve also increased the scope of your corporate partnerships. Would you describe some of these partnerships and what their evolving role is in Habitat’s mission?

Jonathan: You know, corporations have been a really critical part of expanding our work. And to me, like all good partnerships, everyone should both gain, give and gain in a good partnership. And I think in our best partnerships, which had been long-standing, they’ve been able to meaningfully advance Habitat’s mission, which of course, we care passionately about and get more families into safeties and affordable housing. But ideally, they do that in a way that advances the mission of the companies as well.

And where we shine historically has been in two areas. One, the sort of goodwill that’s associated with Habitat’s brands. So our studies have shown that when companies partner with Habitat that makes consumers like their company better. So it was interesting. We don’t, we usually hate spending money on these things. But we revalued our brand a year and a half ago, and we’re struck that Habitat’s brand if we were a private company would be valued at $15.6 billion.

So there’s this aura, halo of goodwill that comes with Habitat. Second piece, because of the volunteer aspect of Habitat has been employee engagement. And so many of our partners have had thousands and thousands of their employees come out and build. And what turns, that turns out to be an incredibly strong way to inculcate those employees into the values of the company and give them a team-building experience.

That’s actually how I first got involved with Habitat. When I was working for the Walt Disney Company, we sponsored two houses in Orlando, Florida. And, you know, Disney spent a fortune on what I would call artificial team building. And the experience of taking my team out and spending a day putting siding on a house with a family was so much more powerful.

And it was by far the most powerful teambuilding we’d ever done. The most gifted construction workers are rarely the more senior people on the team. And it forces you to do things you’re not used to doing and cooperate and learn together but you’re doing something that matters.

And then several of us just kept coming back. And of course, I never knew that was gonna eventually turn into my true vocation. And then the last part is really the strategic part. And I know you’re a management professor, maybe this is the best example, a recent one is we have a wonderful partnership with a company called Thrivent Financial.

And it’s an insurance company, faith-based insurance company that has a very strong ethic for community service. And we sat down and really designed with the leadership teams of both organizations looking at each other’s strategies. And it was about helping Habitat but doing it in a way that would engage the company’s customers as well as their employees.

And so it was fascinating how it’s impacted their culture. They were the product of a merger and they used Habitat as a way to create a new culture for the combined entity. They used to send their best salespeople off on a golf outing to Hawaii. They gave them the choice, you can do the golf outing, or you can go with senior leadership on a Habitat global village build, and they all picked going on the global village build.

So now every year senior leaders take their best salespeople and they go out and build together somewhere in the world. And then now their salespeople can take their customers on global village trips and build. And it turned out that that drives net promoter score more than anything else they can do with their customers.

So it turned out to be a way that has built thousands of houses for Habitat and engage their customers as well as their employees. And so it’s really beautiful. To me, that’s a lovely image of a truly strategic partnership.

Marlena: Absolutely. And what a win-win approach. I really appreciate you sharing that because I think it’s probably one of the least known aspects of Habitat. And so I like sharing that with our listeners. Jonathan, the roots of Habitat are Christian. But you’re very clear that the organization has always been radically inclusive, that you welcome volunteers, supporters, families, people from all backgrounds, and all faiths. Given the Christian roots of the organization, was there ever push-back about this broad level of inclusiveness?

Jonathan: You know, I think it was deeply anchored in the original values. So, Clarence Jordan, who is one of the unknown heroes was the founder of this farm. If you can imagine starting an interracial farm in 1942 in the deep south, and how popular that was, and they were bombed and boycotted and harassed. But it was an intentional Christian community.

And the whole idea was to live out their faith in a very tangible way by training local sharecropping farmers and supporting the community. And the farm never worked very well as a practical example, but he became a powerful voice in non-profit, non-violent social protest, and in pushing for change. And so I think those roots were deeply embedded from the beginning of the…those roots of inclusion were deeply embedded in Habitat from the very beginning.

And we’ve always had, first as a staunch principle that we would serve anyone so that anyone in need of housing who meets our criteria and we probably serve far more non-Christians just by the nature of our global footprint than Christians overall. And then I think internally, you know, in today’s world especially, I’ve learned you can never make everyone happy.

So when I first joined Habitat there were, you know, there were a group of people who were parsing my speeches to see if I said Jesus enough, and there was another group who were saying, “We love Habitat, just don’t ever talk about God.” And what we have tried to say, and we have a phrase that that was not original of me, but I’ve adopted, and love is that God is our center but not our border.

Everyone is welcome. And we genuinely and joyfully welcome everyone to be a part of Habitat. And we really want that. And we don’t, you know, we shouldn’t have to give up the original motivation of why we do the work. So if you look at our mission statement, it’s about putting God’s love into action to bring people together to build homes, communities, and hope.

And in some ways, if you break that into the chunks, God’s love and action, we’re not a church, we’re a 501 C3, we don’t discriminate in hiring. But our motivation is about putting God’s love into action into the world in a tangible way. The methodology is bringing people together and I love that aspect of Habitat. So we have always, and my book is full of those kinds of stories, our stories of breaking down social barriers and racial barriers.

And when Habitat first went to Africa, the first project was in a no man’s land between warring tribes and what was then Zaire. And right away in South Georgia, the projects were breaking down race barriers between blacks and whites. And one of the most pernicious barriers that Habitat has always fought I think is increasingly the economic barrier. And Clarence Jordan had a quote that I just love in the formative letter that was the founding of Habitat.

And he said, “What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but co-workers. And what the rich need is a wise, honorable and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance.” And he had a view that everyone had something to give and everyone had something to gain when they work together. And I think that spirit is what has driven that sense of inclusiveness from the very beginning and something we hold dearly to.

Marlena: Ah, what you’re saying reminds me of a less savory aspect of service that we’re also exploring in this podcast season. And it’s that underbelly that sometimes emerges when those who serve see themselves as great saviors of the poor and needy. And so that spirit of we all have something to give and we all have something to learn, is that the essence of what guards Habitat against the downslide into an unhealthy savior complex or…?

Jonathan: You know, it’s so great you say that because I think it’s one of the…it’s one of the dangerous traps of charity, and I believe deeply in charity, of course. Habitat wouldn’t exist without it. And I think we are deeply called to generosity. But I think it begins with humility. And Habitat’s three core values are humility, courage, and accountability.

And those balance each other really well because if you don’t start with humility, I think that’s where you fall into the trap of that savior, the savior trap, or that subtle temptation to think that you’re better than someone else because you were born with more material wealth. And that is, it is I think, you know, goes against all of our core values.

And I think in this very tough conversation we’re having in the United States right now around racial justice and injustice, you know, I think so many of us and I’m certainly in that category take for granted so many of the things that gave us a leg up in the process. And so it is, in some ways, I could have… It was so hard to pick only seven virtues but to me in some ways, humility undergirds all of those virtues. And you usually find people that are exemplars of those virtues often start with humility.

Marlena: That’s great. Yeah, we are in a season of needing to become more accountable and more mindful of the privileges that we’ve been born into, many of us. You write that sometimes it takes a crisis to get us to pay attention to our shared humanity. Like we’re in the midst of several crises, social, economic, health-related. And just to orient our listeners, this interview is taking place in July of 2020.

Nothing is normal about our lives right now. And many people yearn for what we knew. In a very powerful recent speech, you said, normal wasn’t actually okay. Do you see evidence that we are in fact learning from the current crises to create a more just and healthier world?

Jonathan: You know, I hope so. I’m an optimist by nature. You know, I think those of us who do this kind of work you have to be an optimist and believe things can get better. It’s certainly a very discouraging climate right now. But I do think it’s… I believe deeply in bringing good out of bad and that this is an important conversation, and that you know, many of us have had to personally come to grips with, you know, have we done enough? Have we been strong enough allies?

And have we been too passive allowing a system, you know, that has been in many cases very unjust? Housing has a particularly insidious history because there were at the federal level, federally mandated racial barriers that led to redlining and this huge divide in terms of quality and access to housing. And then many local communities around the country used zoning to further create economic divide and racial divide.

And so I do think housing can also be part of the solution to that. And I hope, I’m sort of determined that we bring good out of COVID is, you know, we’ve experienced natural disasters all over the world. We’ve had man-made disasters, we have never experienced the whole world being impacted at the same time. And so this is unprecedented, I think, for all of us.

But I do hope that out of this will become a yearning for community and with that, you know, a heightened sense of value and community and being willing to contribute to community on the other side. And, you know, when I joined Habitat it was right when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States. And Katrina hit the week before I was officially supposed to start but I’ve been named to the job a few weeks earlier.

And of course, that was a huge housing disaster on top of the Indian Ocean tsunami, which had probably been the biggest global housing disaster in modern times. And those were horrific. But if you could at least bring some positive out of that, it allowed us to start scaling and learning how to build at a whole different scale because the need was so great.

And my hope out of COVID is there will be, you know, an emergence of stronger vision of really just communities and more equitable communities. So we are committed to being a part of that, but certainly, recognize right now we have a long way to go just to get through the COVID crisis.

Marlena: Yeah, yeah. I wanna talk a bit about your book. So just for our listeners, this is not a book that conceptually explores these virtues. I mean, it does a bit of that but what I found most impactful and touching in the book are the stories. I’m a great proponent of the power of storytelling and this book tells powerful stories. When you finish this book, “Our Better Angels” and you send it off to the publisher, what was your wildest dream about the impact it might have?

Jonathan: So I think my biggest dream was that when people read it, the response will be, “I need to go do something in my community,” that this will be an encouragement. I think there’s so much if you watch the media that just can make you discouraged and want to give up or frustrated and angry.

And I wanted to do something that was positive and gave tangible examples of how everyday people were having a huge impact in the communities around them or in communities around the world. And so that was really the goal of it. And I agree so much with you about story. I’ve written other things that are analytical about housing and policy and we need those too. But I actually think hearts are changed by story and so wanted to focus on the transforming aspect of story.

Marlena: Yeah, hearts are changed by story. I so agree with that. We’ll touch on the other six virtues in a moment but first, service. You described service as the place where the other virtues come to life. I grew up with a living model of this in my book, “Nothing Bad Between Us.” I described my parents’ deep devotion to service.

They were Mennonite medical missionaries in Paraguay. And among other things, they changed how leprosy is treated on the planet today. Their service came to define who they were. And in fact, this podcast season explores service as a path to helping us become our truest selves.

And exactly in line with our theme, Jonathan, you’ve written, and I quote, “By serving others, we become our best selves.” My question to you is this. Based on your experience, what is it about service that makes it the wellspring of the other six virtues?

Jonathan: You know, to me, service is so fundamental because it takes us out of ourselves. I think so much of our media causes us to turn inward and focus on ourselves and then we tend to get…it’s easy to become selfish, it’s easy to become inward-looking. And to me, one of the most healing things someone can do if they’re struggling is go help someone else.

And it turns out to actually be a selfish act. In my own personal experience that it is, it can then generate those feelings of joy, feelings of community, feelings of respect, those others, the relationships that come with it. And so that genuine sense to serve allows us to tap into, I think, you know, a core human need to be useful to others, to be helpful to others, and it’s a way to activate it.

And so often, I think when I run into people who just seem stuck, my encouragement to them is don’t try to have the whole plan at once. Take a step but go put a foot in the water, put your toes in the water and go help somebody. Go do something, and then you’ll find out if that’s, you know…then that may lead to what you’re really supposed to do. But don’t just wait. Go out and do something.

Marlena: Yeah, yeah. So kindness, another of your virtues. It doesn’t just impact your actions, your behaviors, you say it actually changes our brains. So how does practicing kindness change my brain?

Jonathan: Well, it is… I’m a big believer in spiritual practices and this is whether you’re, you know, aligned with specific faith or secular, I think those practices are shown. And I started with a sports analogy as a professional coach long, long ago. I was a rower and a rowing coach, and you actually train your body. And one of the things we would do with athletes is before a match, you would actually have them sit down in the dark and visualize the entire race and how they’re gonna respond.

And for these finely tuned athletes, their pulse would be up at 180, 190 as they’re visualizing it. Your brain, it actually goes into wiring and the experience in so many ways is that practices can change your orientation. So you know, you’ve probably…many people have heard, you know, if you act as if you love someone, you actually over time will start to love them.

It’s very helpful, it’s very hard to talk yourself into loving somebody. If you practice kindness it actually builds muscle memory. And I think there’s such positive reinforcement of it that one can become a more kind person wherever you’re starting from. And it’s something that is so needed right now.

I think our media world is rewarded for the absence of kindness. The more extreme you are the more eyeballs you can catch. And we’re being dominated by very strong voices from the two extremes. And I think that it’s drowning out the opportunities to tell these stories of optimism and hope and the good things that are happening in communities.

Marlena: Yeah. In your story about Denise, you describe how the gift of learning to accept kindness, teaches us to be better at giving kindness. How do we learn to give kindness by learning to accept it?

Jonathan: You know, it’s such a good insight because it is…some of us are better at being givers than receivers. And it goes to that idea of charity as well, that real partnership means you should be able to give and receive joyfully and gratefully. And I know I have friends who you know, struggle sometimes, who don’t want to accept a compliment, don’t want you know, or don’t wanna accept praise. And there’s a lovely humility to that.

But it also then takes something away from the other. You know, none of us wanna give a gift and not have it acknowledged or responded. And so I do think that goes in humility as well, that in some ways I hate the sort of myth of the independent man or woman in America because none of us are independent. We all so need community. And there are always times where we need that hand up from someone else. I still never met anybody who didn’t need affirmation or kindness.

Marlena: Yeah, yeah. Another virtue is community. So I’d like to have you talk a bit about how you define community and why it’s so important.

Jonathan: You know, I think community is, especially in the era of COVID right now, something people yearn for so much. And lots of people have written about it. But for me it’s that sense of being part of something greater than yourselves and being relationally connected so that you feel, one, you’re not alone. So we all need community and friends and support.

But I think it goes another step beyond that which is, how do we become part of creating the kind of community we all wanna be a part of. And then what are we willing to actually do or sacrifice or give to create that? And I think one of the reasons that Habitat build site has become so powerful is we’ve lost a lot of those intermediary community gathering spots.

And I don’t want to in any way glamorize the past because I think as you’ve written about, you know, there were lots of issues that were far from perfect in the past, but we used to have more ways to connect in community in some ways. Now gives the example of growing up in my college town, which was small enough that, you know, everybody was part of some kind of a service organization. If you went to school, we all went to the same school.

So, the whole town went to the same, you know, in our case, two middle schools. So, there was a bringing of people together. I grew up in a Catholic family. Anybody who is Catholic from all economic, you know, strata went to the one church. So you had so much mixing and sense of community. And now we have become so economically segregated and spatially segregated that people are only kind of mixing with their own social class or their own small groups.

And a lot of those intermediary service organizations have disappeared. And I do think that we need to find ways to help people feel connected. And it’s where service and community are so deeply linked but truly relationally connected. So service without relationship is still a good thing but it’s not a great thing. Service and community together then become very powerful. And I think it’s the chance to build meaningful relationships that is where you find community.

Marlena: Yeah. And it seems to me we’re called to redefine what community means during this season.

Jonathan: Yes. And I’ve loved some of the stories of creatively and hopefully, safely people are finding ways to connect. And we’re learning how to do virtual community which, but I have to tell you as an extrovert, I can’t wait to be actually with, you know, my country colleagues and Habitat colleagues as opposed to just being on video with them.

Marlena: Yes. So then there’s empowerment. Angel’s story illustrates that I think many of us think of Habitat as filling the most basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, safety, just basic survival needs. But you really illustrate with Angel’s story that the mission goes way beyond that, and it reaches all the way to empowerment and self-esteem. And I think maybe some of us have thought less about that in relation to Habitat. How does it do that?

Jonathan: I think there is the process I described with Habitat is a huge part of it. And I am just continually inspired by the families I meet and the strength and the barriers they’ve overcome and the tenacity. And Angel’s story is one of my favorites.

Angel is from Denver, Colorado. Went through a tough divorce with three little girls and ended up homeless and sleeping on a friend’s couch. And they would go to a McDonald’s and do their homework and Angel got frustrated. She’s like, “This is not the image I want my girls to have of me, and it’s not the world I want.” So her response, though they had almost nothing by material sense, was to go and serve. So they just started volunteering all around the city.

And in volunteering they built relationships, the girls got to learn about all kinds of parts of the city. And they actually started volunteering with Habitat for Humanity. And at some point, it occurred Angel that maybe she could qualify for a house. So I love the image that here was a Habitat volunteer who didn’t have adequate housing and turned out to then qualify to become a Habitat homebuyer.

And I had the great privilege of helping build Angel’s house as did President and Mrs. Carter. And she’s an incredible woman, and I just I’ve seen… We’ve had her as a spokesperson often in Denver for Habitat now because it’s such an example of the role model she is. Her girls are all going to college, they are thriving, they’re gonna make the world better.

And it was a perfect example of what Habitat calls, the hand up not a handout. You know, she worked so hard to create the opportunities for herself and her family, and just needed that, you know, extra helping hand to be able to make that leap up. And now, you know that family will be anchored and self-sufficient for generations. And that’s so much what we’re about.

Marlena: Yeah, and even here it’s so often in the book, I was struck by how much we all have to gain with these virtues. It’s not about the impoverished and the poor. You state that even the wealthiest among us who we seem to not need anything, but we can be so empowered by empowering others, I love that.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Marlena: Joy. So most people would say that joy is an emotion that I feel because of something good that’s happened in my life. You say joy is a choice. Would you say a bit more about that?

Jonathan: You know, this is one of my favorites and probably we had the most debates about it, including it, but I think it is… I believe we can choose joy, not that our circumstances will necessarily be joyful but that very often. And I think we’ve all met them, you know, we’ve met people who just walk around and when you’re with them they make, they light up the room and they make everyone feel better about the world.

And we’ve all met the people who don’t behave that way. And so to suck the energy out of a room and are joy-takers rather than joy-bringers. And I think back to the idea of kindness, I think you can practice joy. And for this, there’s a faith component of this. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is from Philippians and I quote in the book, where we are called to rejoice in the Lord always. I’ll say it again, rejoice. “Let your gentleness be known to all.”

And I won’t go through the whole but it’s a counter-intuitive idea that we are called to, to be joyful. And I think the heart of that is joy is not about our circumstances, it’s ultimately about our identity. And that regardless of circumstances we are called to bring…to bring joy to others, and in that, we find joy. So it becomes that virtual circle if done well. So it is…what I think we can do is, and my hope is people will choose to be one of those joy-giving members of their community versus as a friend of mine says one of those extra grace required members of their community.

Marlena: Let’s talk a bit about respect. There’s so much divisiveness and such seeming lack of respect in our society today. You write that you believe that humility is the starting point of respect. I looked up the etymology of the word “humility.” I’m pretty much a language freak. It’s lowly, literally on the ground from the Latin “humus,” the word for Earth.

So humility is a lowly or modest view of my own importance. Jonathan, it seems to me that humility itself is an important virtue. And in fact, you say that it undergirds all of them. And we don’t have enough of it today. From your many experiences would you give us an example of factors or experiences that might lead someone to move toward greater humility?

Jonathan: You know, it’s some of my… I think if I pick some of my favorite stories, they come out of that respect chapter. Because I do think, and since I’m the son of a classics professor, so if you think that humility almost the opposite of humility is hubris, which is where you would put yourself with the gods.

And of course, when that happens, people always die in spectacular fashion or come down in tragic ways. And so I think respect starts with the idea that every person on this earth, you know, is made in God’s image and is deserving of respect, to begin with. But I think it comes with also the willingness to stop and learn, and that’s where some of these experiences I think can be so powerful, and across different barriers.

And a couple of my favorites about respect, if I can tell the short versions of them, one that’s been so relevant to our times now is from Durham, North Carolina. And if we can think back to a terrible moment in recent history where there was the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. One of those just heartbreaking, senseless acts of violence.

And the next day that Beth El synagogue in Durham, North Carolina had been scheduled to complete a Habitat for Humanity house that they’ve been working on. And there’s so many elements that I really liked about this story. And my friend, Blake who was head of Durham Habitat, you know, checked and said, “Oh, we are so heartbroken by this tragedy. Do you want to postpone?” And the synagogue said, “No, the most healing thing we could do is go and serve.”

So the day after, and then there’s a nice even sub-story that the synagogue was temporarily operating out of a Presbyterian church who loaned them space because their synagogue was under construction. So here was a Jewish synagogue living in a Presbyterian Church that comes out and completes and dedicates a house, a home for a immigrant Muslim family.

And I just thought, “That’s such a nice image of community and respect,” which is in order to work together. We don’t have to all agree theologically, we don’t have to agree politically, but we can start from working towards our shared values. And all the faces of the world have values towards serving people in need. And if we can find tangible ways to go and tap into those, I think it creates respect.

And I love that image if you’ve ever read the book, “Getting to Yes,” Bill Uri’s. I’m a fan of his, who’s done a lot of conflict resolution work. And he and I were talking. And he said, “You know, I’ve always believed if you have a really tough thing to talk about, don’t sit across the table and negotiate, go for a walk because then you’re shoulder-to-shoulder, you’re facing the same direction, it changes the whole dynamic.”

And he said, “You know what? Even better, go build a Habitat house because then you’re doing something that is useful, that appeals to both of your shared values that forces you to cooperate and collaborate, and then that creates trust, that creates respect, and then that leads to the possibility of a relationship that can lead to better outcomes.”

And one of my other heroes, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who I think is one of the world’s great heroes, sponsored a Habitat build in South Africa every year, and at one of the builds he said something that I just loved. He said, “As the physical walls of the house go up, the invisible walls that separate us as people come tumbling down. And hope is built in the community.”

And I think at our best, I love those images of learning. The other story in that chapter that I love is the one of Vic Romback and Jim Lemke building in Vietnam. And this is our global village program where people go from one part of the world to another part of the world, to build homes with families and local communities.

And one of the ones I love is that we’ve had a whole program of U.S. Vietnam vets going to build in Vietnam for families impacted by the war and working alongside Vietnamese veterans of the war. And there’s this catharsis and healing and I’ve had the privilege of doing that twice and getting to interview and talk to the veterans on both sides.

And for both sides it allows them to sort of finally sort of put down the horrific scars of the war and to find some practical way. And I still kind of get teary when I read or tell that story. Because it’s all about respect and that respect of each person’s basic human dignity even though we are separated by language, culture, politics, and so many other things.

Marlena: Yeah. Doug Bradley, who’s the author of “Who’ll Stop the Rain” is a Vietnam vet that was on this show last season, and he talks about very similar experiences of vets going back to Vietnam and hearing each other’s stories and how impactful that’s been for the healing on both sides.

Yeah, yeah. So the last virtue is generosity. And, Jonathan, you write, and I quote, “Generosity, heartfelt or even a little forced,” and this is the piece I’m gonna wanna go back to, “being forced, is a powerful balm for the giver and the receiver. When we give time, resources, energy, we become less important. It’s downright freeing.” This really got me thinking, how can generosity be freeing when it’s forced?

Jonathan: You know, it’s something I have struggled with. And let me give an example maybe that will be helpful. Many, many middle schools and high schools now require community service. And I used to think, oh, you shouldn’t force service on people because it might backfire.

But I’ve been converted because I’ve run into so many people for whom even if they went into it grudgingly, that opened their eyes. Maybe that was the first time they’d been in another part of their own community. Maybe that’s the first time they’d actually, you know, gotten a look at how others live in their own community. And that can, you know, sort of be the spark that starts a fire and starts movement.

And so, you know, to me, you want it to be voluntary. With our children when they were little, you know, we did the share, save, spend. They could get their allowance and they could…we wanted them to save so much, we wanted to give away so much. And then they could use the rest for whatever they wanted.

And so we kind of forced that at the beginning because we were trying to build a pattern, because we knew that a pattern of generosity is really important. And the data would show that when people learn generosity as a child before they turn 18 that tends to be a long-term pattern. Whereas if they don’t have a pattern of service or generosity early it takes a much bigger kind of interruption to kind of build that in.

So I think, you know, starting a muscle, you know, building in that pattern and lifestyle of generosity, whether it’s material or your time, or all I think is something that we want to do for young people, but it is a delicate balance. I mean, I don’t think…you want encouragement but not necessarily coercion.

Marlena: Yeah. You again mentioned muscle. I think bred underneath all of these discussions about these virtues is that they are in fact muscles and that we can strengthen them by using them. I love that. I’m going to change the subject and brag on you a bit.

Last December, Engage for Good, which is a professional organization that supports both for-profit and not-for-profit partnerships, named Habitat for Humanity its 2020 Golden Halo award, nonprofit winner, the group’s highest honor for causes that engage in activities designed to do well by doing good, what an honor. Congratulations.

Jonathan: Thank you.

Marlena: Engage for Good president, David Hessekiel, said and I quote, “The Golden Halo awards are reserved for those companies and nonprofit organizations that manage their affairs in a manner that meaningfully and measurably yield social and financial dividends.”

Jonathan, we’ve talked a lot about the meaningful part of that formula. Would you share with our listeners some of Habitat’s specific measurable and financial dividends?

Jonathan: Oh, thank you. And thanks so much for that. We were very honored and obviously that’s on behalf of all of Habitat and the countless people who have been part of making that possible. So just some metrics for your listeners to give a sense of scale of Habitat, we have grown, and we are a federation. So in the U.S. we have about 1,200 local affiliates that do the local building across the U.S. And then as you said, we’re in about 70 countries.

If you add all of Habitat together last year, we had about 2.3 billion in total revenues, which is a mixture of selling the houses and recouping those philanthropy which has been a huge piece. And then we also have a chain of Habitat for Humanity restores, which is now almost 1,000 stores mostly in North America that take used housing products and then resell them.

So they’re thrift stores that keep things out of landfills. And that generated last year over $500 million for Habitat as well while keeping hundreds of thousands of tons of materials out of landfills. So it’s a really nice sort of triple bottom line enterprise, social enterprise that supports Habitat’s work and gets more families in.

A couple of things that people might not know that we do that I’m excited in addition to the direct work house by house where we build the homes, we’re doing a lot of work around neighborhood revitalization where we create partnerships or join partnerships in communities all over the country and thinking about long-term transformational change where housing is a component, but we also need jobs, and public safety, and better schools, and food security and all.

And so trying to bring all the partners together in a specific neighborhood to lift those communities up. And I think we’ve seen some wonderful progress and still enormous needs for that work. The maybe most audacious aspect of Habitat’s work has been trying to influence the way that markets work. And I’ve been very excited about this.

And so we became a pioneer in housing microfinance trying to get the microfinance industry to begin doing home improvement lending to extremely low-income families. And we actually launched a wholesale fund called micro-build where we’re lending money out to microfinance banks, training them on how to start housing portfolios, and we’re now seeing real legs on that.

The micro-build fund itself got the highest rating of any project that’s been rated by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. And now we’ve seen many microfinance banks putting their own capital in because they’re saying it’s viable to make these small home improvement loans to low-income families, and that’s allowing millions and millions of people to have access to finance for the first time.

And then we’re doing a lot in the area of policy and advocacy, particularly around property rights and land rights because for so many families around the world and especially women, they may have lived on their property for generations. But without the legal right to that, they can’t access loans, they aren’t protected if someone wanted to push them or evict them from their property, or they might not have access to be able to inherit their property without that documentation.

So we’ve been working very hard on title and tenure to protect vulnerable families and especially women around the world. So those are a few things that we are doing. We do a lot around disaster response. And as you said at the beginning of the show, we’re now able to impact millions of people per year, which is really exciting. But as excited as I am about that, you know, in the U.S. right now there are 18 million households paying over half their income on their rent or mortgage, and 39 million households paying more than the sort of socially or financially acceptable a third of their income on rent or mortgage.

And that’s about to get far worse as the federal subsidies go away. So we have a housing crisis already in the U.S. And around the world there are about 1.6 billion people living in substandard or poverty housing. So I’m really excited about our progress. But at the same time, you know, part of our mission is to get everyone who currently has a nice place to live and a nice place to shelter in place for COVID to think about what would be like if you had to shelter in place and you didn’t have proper housing, and how that works for, you know, a horrific number of people around the world.

Marlena: So both very exciting news and sobering at the same time, yeah. Jonathan, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to hear, either something we’ve already covered that you would like to reinforce or maybe something we have not covered, what would that be?

Jonathan: You know, we’ve covered a lot, Marlena. And thank you so much, but if it’s okay maybe I’ll end with what might be my favorite story because I actually just corresponded with him this morning. But there’s a story in the chapter on generosity of my friend, Boris Henderson. And Boris, I’ll give you the short version of the story and then close because he is just an amazing human being.

And Boris grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina in really tough conditions. His mom lived in a neighborhood called the hole, and you can imagine how nice that was. And it was high-crime. There were lots of shootings. It was a dangerous place and Boris was not doing well in school. He was failing first grade. He had no place to study. They were all piled in, they had no indoor plumbing, it was really rough conditions.

But people saw promise and invested in Boris and saw a promise and his mom gets a lot of credit for being determined. And when he was in third grade, she qualified to purchase a Habitat house and they move from the hole to Optimist Park. And I love the imagery of that. And with that, it turned out Boris was actually a very bright kid.

Now he had a safe place to study, he had stability, he had some security, he had some people who looked out and mentored him. And you fast forward, Boris ends up getting a full scholarship to Davidson College, gets an MBA, goes into banking, and then decides to start giving back in affordable housing and now in senior care.

And Boris is, as far as I know, the first person who grew up in a Habitat home to serve on Habitat for Humanity’s International Board of Directors. And I share it because Boris is one of those people who just makes the world a better place. And just as I was talking about, you know, celebrating Habitat’s progress against broad need, I share it too because what I would ask your listeners is think about all the other Borises out there who just could make our world so much better if they had a chance, if they could just have the opportunity to grow into all that God intended for their lives.

And so my hope is, I hope people will read the book because I hope it will encourage them. I do want, I’m always supposed to remind 100% of my proceeds go to Habitat. So this is not a selfish ask. But my hope is that whether you read it or not, that this will encourage you to go out, look for something in your community that needs to get better, and make a small commitment and take a positive step and go do something about it. And that will hopefully be the beginning of a path to great joy.

Marlena: This has been such a meaningful conversation with Jonathan. Thank you so much for taking the time to join our podcast.

Jonathan: It’s a great pleasure, Marlena. And thanks so much for having me on.