MacKenzie Scott donation to boost Habitat’s work in Richmond County

ABERDEEN — Habitat for Humanity of the NC Sandhills has received a $3.5 million unrestricted donation from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott which will help the affordable housing nonprofit expand its efforts in Richmond County and its other service areas.

This donation is part of Scott’s total $436 million donation to Habitat for Humanity International which was announced this week; the Sandhills Habitat is one of its 84 affiliates. The Sandhills branch serves Richmond, Moore and Hoke counties.

Amie Fraley, executive director of the Sandhills Habitat, said that they had known something big was coming for several weeks but that it was “super secretive,” to the point where Fraley was trying to figure out if it was real or not. In a press release, the Sandhills Habitat called the funds an “epic gift” and hailed Scott’s selection of Habitat International as the first affordable housing organization she has worked with.

Jonathan Reckford, Habitat for Humanity International’s CEO, told the Associated Press this week that this money comes at a time when “in some ways, the state of housing affordability is the worst that it has been in modern times.”

The bulk of this money will be used to overcome the nonprofit’s recent difficulty purchasing land in the Sandhills region, while the costs of constructing the houses will continue to be covered with Habitat’s normal funding sources, according to Fraley.

“The benefit of that chunk of money [from Scott] is to be able to secure that large piece of land where we could know that we’ll be building there, let’s say, for the next 10 years and that’s just a huge upfront cost that can be really difficult if you don’t have something like this [size of donation],” Fraley said in an interview Thursday. “The sobering fact is that $3.5 million won’t last too long but it will give us a foundation that we can then build on — we can be building houses for the foreseeable future.”

Sandhills Habitat has been focused on increasing production levels of new housing and home repairs in recent years. The goal going forward, as it relates to Richmond County, is to be able to build three houses per year which will cost about $400,000 annually, and invest about $350,000 just in repairing and sustaining homes, using just Habitat’s regular funding, Fraley said.

She explained that up until about two years ago, Habitat’s main concern was securing enough money to be able to invest in land but now there’s very little available at all due to developers buying up large tracts of land, especially in Moore County, which she attributed to the county’s population growth as a result of people moving out of bigger cities during the pandemic.

“We’re really excited at the local level because there’s just such an increasing difficulty in securing land and preparing ourselves to continue doing the work that we’re doing that this couldn’t be more timely,” Fraley said.

Finding a way to spend the money, she added, isn’t too difficult because Habitat maintains a “wishlist” of projects and needs to address just in case they secure a significant funding source. The $436 million donation to Habitat is the largest publicly disclosed donation by Scott, who was left with about $35 billion following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — who is currently the second-richest person in the world — and she has since pledged to give away the majority of her wealth.

“Serving more families in Richmond County has been a big piece of our strategic plan for the last few years so this is helping us further that greatly,” Fraley said. “We plan to make sure and utilize a very large chunk of those funds in Richmond County and in Hoke County — our entire service area. So we really want to be mindful of the fact that we cover three counties and we want to make sure that we’re sharing this gift across all three counties that we serve.”

Over the next month, Habitat’s finance committee will map out the finer details of how to use the money; likely a combination of spending some immediately and using some to set the nonprofit up to keep their work going strong for the coming years.

In Richmond County, Fraley said their approach will be to look to purchase a large tract of land and install infrastructure which will allow the nonprofit to work “more energetically” towards their goals and free them from the limit of only working on days that volunteers can come out to the site.

“We recognize that [relying so heavily on volunteers] can keep us from moving forward as fast as the need is in Richmond County,” Fraley said.

As part of Habitat’s recent focus on home repairs in Richmond County, the nonprofit has partnered with the Little Philadelphia community for about the last three months, replicating the efforts they’ve put in in Dobbins Heights. Fraley and other Habitat staff have been networking with church leaders and using other avenues to gauge what residents want to see in their community, and many have pitched in to help do the work, according to Fraley.

“It’s more about having a conversation and figuring out how we can all come together to get more done — we could just come out and do repairs as people call us, that’s fine — but we find there’s a neat amount of energy that happens when we’re all kind of teaming up and getting to know each other and having maybe a goal in mind of ‘let’s knock out 30 repairs in this community and maybe three years from now we’re going to build a new house,’” she said.

The Habitat ReStore in Rockingham, which sold donated furniture and other items to support the nonprofit’s construction projects, closed on Oct. 31, 2020 after Sandhills Habitat received a total of $373,000 in grant funding, which Fraley said at the time allowed them to serve more families than the “inconsistent” ReStore did.

Fraley confirmed this week that the ReStore will not reopen.

“Our ReStores are meant as a fund development tool for the work that we do so if we have a store that isn’t able to contribute the kind of funds that we can secure using other avenues, then it’s better for the community if we focus our resources on those better avenues,” Fraley said.

Even with this money from Scott, Fraley said that Habitat still relies on donations in order to help gain leverage in applying for grants to fund the construction of homes and home repairs. She said that every dollar donated to Habitat can leverage $5 in grant funding. Habitat is also looking for anyone who is interested in selling their large tracts of land to a good cause.

Anyone interested in supporting Habitat’s efforts can email volunteer@sandhillshabitat.org or call 910-295-1934. Those with land-specific inquiries can email Fraley at afraley@sandhillshabitat.org.

Habitat will hold a dedication for a home for volunteer Mark Carlisle at 2 p.m. on March 31 at 106 Rosemont Ave. in Hamlet.