Habitat For Humanity Hires An Executive Director

By Andrew Gorosko

Based on its goal of increasing the number of affordable homes it builds in the region, Housatonic Habitat for Humanity (HHH) has hired an executive director to coordinate its home construction.

Lynne Gilbert of Danbury started work last month in Habitat’s downtown Ridgefield office. Ms Gilbert formerly was the executive director of Literacy Volunteers in Danbury. A former teacher, Ms Gilbert also was a substance abuse counselor at the Midwestern Connecticut Council on Alcoholism and at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury.

“Half my time will be spent on the construction process,” Ms Gilbert said in an interview this week in HHH’s offices on Bailey Avenue in Ridgefield. That will involve keeping open the lines of communication among all those involved in the Habitat home construction process. Her duties also will include public relations and fund-raising.

“The mission is very simple – to provide decent housing for everyone,” Ms Gilbert said.  

“We thought long and hard about the implications of an all-volunteer organization hiring a paid staffer and the time seemed right to make the move,” HHH President Christie Davey said in a statement.

“We’re planning to complete four homes this year, up to 12 annually within five years, and it’s difficult to support that kind of growth without a solid infrastructure. And that’s what we’re getting with Lynne – someone who knows the Danbury area, how the non-profit world operates, the importance of being organized and of timely communication. I think she’ll be a real asset to the organization in our mission to eliminate substandard housing in our area,” Ms Davey said.

 HHH, an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity International, is composed of local volunteers who work in partnership with low-income families to build new affordable homes and rehabilitate existing homes using donations of money and construction materials.

In Newtown, Habitat completed its first new house last year on Philo Curtis Road. Next door, Habitat is building a second new home. Dedication ceremonies for the second house tentatively are scheduled for Memorial Day.

Habitat is interested in buying one of the several small, run-down houses the town owns on the east side of Queen Street, so that its volunteers can bring it up to modern standards. Habitat would resell the house to a family for affordable housing.

 Habitat is awaiting the outcome of discussions within the Newtown government on whether that house and the others should be demolished instead of being sold, Ms Gilbert said. The town bought the houses last year from the state as part of the state’s disposition of Fairfield Hills.

Besides its efforts in Newtown, HHH completed it first new home on Elm Street in Danbury in 1996, helped renovate a Danbury home in 1997, and late last year began work on a new home on Rowan Street in Danbury.

Of the new home construction process, Ms Gilbert noted, “The hard part is getting the land.”

To facilitate land acquisition and eventual home construction, HHH board members, who are established members of their respective communities, pursue Habitat’s goals through the contacts they have in a process of “constant networking,” Ms Gilbert said. Board members are in fields such as real estate, banking, financial services, and publishing.

HHH has a database containing the names of 3,000 individuals who may help in accomplishing home construction projects. Several hundred of those people live in Newtown and Sandy Hook, Ms Gilbert said.

 Not everyone who volunteers for a Habitat home construction project is directly involved with building a house, she said, noting that some volunteers donate their skills for tasks which support the home construction process, such as food preparation for workers.

Until now, Habitat has done all of its home construction work on Saturdays. The organization may add Wednesdays to that schedule, Ms Gilbert said.

Ms Gilbert said Habitat would like to relocate to office space in Danbury, since that is where most of its upcoming home building activity is anticipated. “There’s probably more opportunity to get property in Danbury,” she said.

 “We consider any plot [of land] that comes to our attention in any town,” she said. Besides Danbury and Newtown, HHH is organized to serve Ridgefield, Brookfield and Bethel.

Habitat is always seeking new volunteers to help it accomplish its home building projects. “We need a mixture of people,” Ms Gilbert said. “We need people who are willing to learn and willing to commit to our mission,” she said.

HHH is an independent, non-profit organization responsible for its own fund raising, site selection, family selection and nurturing, construction and mortgage servicing. In Fairfield County, the organization needs $65,000 to build a house, compared with the national average of $38,000. The Danbury area’s rental rates are the ninth highest in the US, according to Habitat.

Under the Habitat system, the family makes a down payment of 1 percent on a house and invests 400 hours of sweat equity in building the house. The family buys the home at cost, paying a no-interest mortgage into a revolving fund to finance the construction of more homes. Information on HHH is available at the organization’s Web site on the Internet at: www.danburyhabitat.org/.