Remembering Millard Fuller
A Guy Who Gave Everything Away and Got the World in Return

As we celebrate our first Black History Month with our first Black President, I am saddened to learn that we have lost a man who, while not an African American, was well-loved by countless Africans, and who changed the history of America. Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity International, and inventor of the concept of "Sweat Equity" passed away last week at the age of 74. While his last few years at the helm of his beloved Habitat were controversial, he will always be remembered as the man who’s relentless drive to serve people in need sparked hundreds of thousands of volunteers to come together to "eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world, and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action."

A once wealthy businessman who made his first million before the age of thirty, Millard became estranged from his family because the art and science of money had evolved into his only joy. In an effort to win back his wife and children and soothe his troubled soul, Millard vowed to give away his entire portfolio and moved his family into a Christian community called, "Koinonia Farm" near Americus, Georgia in 1966.

Founded by the radical scholar, philosopher and writer, Clarence Jordan, Koinonia had been around since the 1940’s as a fully integrated, sustainable, Christian commune that welcomed anyone who was committed to equality, nonviolence, and economic sharing. As the cold war heated up, “economic equality” became associated with “communism”, but the Koinonia residents were steadfast in their beliefs and sustained themselves by raising and selling food. In the late 1950’s, the Ku Klux Klan were outraged to discover blacks and whites living as equals right under their noses in central Georgia. They burned and bombed the many stands that the ever growing farm had established throughout the region and boycotted any efforts to sell goods in the neighboring towns. Ever optimistic, Clarence responded by creating a mail order pecan and candy business through various New York magazines, using the slogan, “Help us Ship the Nuts Out of Georgia!”

It was during his years at Koinonia that Millard gave his money to various charities until it was completely gone. He also studied philosophy and theology under Clarence, took several mission trips to Africa, and learned about poverty from the folks at the edge of the sprawling communal farm. Millard was outraged to learn that the neighbors, who were the descendants of slaves, were completely uneducated and lived in a one room shack without plumbing or insulation, “in America, in the 1960s,” he would say with disbelief. Determined to “do something”, Millard led the Koinonia residents to fund and build a home for this family, and then another, and then another, until there was an entire village of new homes built by neighbors to help their neighbors.

In 1972, the Fullers decided to build another village, this time in Zaire, Africa, as missionaries in association with the United Church of Christ. After four years of building successfully in the city of Mbandaka, Millard returned to Georgia with a vision that, “everyone needed decent places to live,” and that this could be accomplished by “getting volunteers to work side by side with new homeowners to build a home and then selling the home with a no interest, no profit mortgage” that the homeowner could actually afford. With that unbelievable, egalitarian, premise in mind, Millard founded “Habitat for Humanity” in 1976. He was determined, just like his teacher and friend Clarence Jordan that people of different races, different cultures, and different ideas could, and should, come together to help each other, and to help folks who truly need help, simply because you can.

I was blessed to meet Millard on several occasions during my first few years with Greater Cleveland Habitat, to hear him speak, attend his class, talk one-on-one about Habitat’s history, his views on “doing God’s work”, and to be there at a national meeting in Los Angeles, when a young Americorps volunteer said to Millard, “People always want us to tell the whole Habitat story in three minutes and I’d like to hear your three minute version.” Without hesitation, Millard invited a local Habitat for Humanity Partner Family member, that he had met the day before, to come to the front of the room and said, “Tell these nice folks where you and your three children are living while you work on your new Habitat home.” Hundreds of us began to weep openly as she tearfully described, between gulping breaths, the converted 8’ by 8’ chicken coop that she and he children had been sleeping in for nearly a year. When she finished, Millard simply smiled that big grin that he often sported, hugged her and said, “That’s the Habitat story.”

Today, there are 1.5 million people in 3,000 neighborhoods across 100 countries living in Habitat for Humanity houses; over 500 of them live in nearly 160 Habitat homes in Cleveland’s central city. I’m pretty sure that these numbers will continue doubling every few years as time rolls on. One man can, indeed, change the world…

From Cool Cleveland contributor Jeffrey Bowen jeffreybowenAThotmail.com

Bowen’s poems have been published by Art Crimes, Cool Cleveland, Green Panda Press, Hessler Street Fair, Procrastination Press, the Poet’s and Writers League of Greater Cleveland (now The Lit), The City, The Cleveland Reader, and Whiskey Island Magazine; and he has written for City News, Call & Post, Girl Scout New, Neighborhood News and Nonprofit Notes. He directs, and writes for, Greater Cleveland Habitat for Humanity. (:divend:)