What holds us together

Partnerships with the entire community are vital to the success of Habitat. Churches, businesses, neighborhood associations, service groups, media and local government are all significant supporters of Habitat's goal of eliminating poverty housing and homelessness.

Support for Habitat comes in many forms. Financial gifts, in-kind gifts, volunteers (both skilled and unskilled), and prayer are always welcome and much appreciated.

SHFH invites groups to sponsor the construction of Habitat houses. Sponsorship means raising $30,000 toward the more than $70,000 cost of construction (2006) and recruiting and scheduling volunteers.

Recent house sponsors have included Church Workers United and African-American Christian Unity (an ecumenical group of local churches), local Lutheran Churches of the Missouri Synod and Bay Conference ELCA, local United Methodist Churches, Catholic Churches of Saginaw County, Citizens Bank, Saginaw County Medical Society, Dow Chemical Company, Dow Corning Corporation’s Healthcare Industries Materials Site and Hemlock Semiconductor Corporation, and St. Mary's of Michigan hospital.

Area schools, too, have contributed to the success of the affiliate. Residential building trades classes at Delta College (11), Saginaw Career Complex (14), and Carrollton High School (8), and Bridgeport High School (2) have completes multiple houses.

Partnerships sometimes come in unlikely places. Inmates at Saginaw Correctional Facility built a 3-bedroom house on prison grounds and was then delivered, completely finished, to a site on South Wheeler Street in Saginaw. This was the World’s First prison-built Habitat house!

Saginaw Habitat for Humanity is perhaps best known for the 'blitz build', an annual event where over 1,000 volunteers of all ages, backgrounds and skill levels join together to build several houses in just two weeks for deserving low-income families. More than half of SHFH’s houses have been completed during its ten annual blitz builds.

Michigan's 1998 Affiliate of the Year and winner of the Midwest Region's Hope Builders Award in July 1999 also has an ongoing program we would like to expand—that of rehabilitating homes—as a year-round task.