Green Country Habitat for Humanity

About Green Country Habitat for Humanity

Tulsa Habitat for Humanity started in 1988. Our mission: seeking to put God's love into action, we bring people together to build homes, communities and hope.

For many years our affiliate was operated by volunteers, some were even Habitat homeowners. Homes that we build were affordable and very basic. The number of affordable homes we were able to contribute to our community was low given how we operated - find a family that qualified, find funding, find volunteers and generally it would take 6 months to build the home (at least). We would hold the note for the family and start the process all over. At this rate, we didn't build many homes each year. In fact, I think the most we built was around 12-15 homes/year.

When our new CEO arrived, we studied how we could improve our operations and everything changed. We went from a volunteer organization to a more professional agency, from building with volunteers to building with contractors on a line of credit, from holding the note to assembling a group of banking partners to offer our homeowners a below market interest rate home mortgage and found DPA to buy down that interest rate. Further, we also started building an appreciable asset and we now have multiple home models to choose from.

Our next step was to set up a separate supporting entity to broaden our services - Boomtown Development Co. is able to offer single family homeownership to both affordable and workforce families and also is able to provide rental housing.

We have utilized numerous sources of funding during our expansion and are looking forward to exploring that even more.

Over the past few years we have grown not only our staff, but also our service area, retail operations (from 1 retail outlet to 5) and budget. The growth of our retail operations allows us to increase our self sufficiency and use funder dollars on our various programs and initiatives.