Shawn Means

Habitat for Humanity since its beginnings in Georgia in 1976 has built more than 20,000 homes providing safe, affordable shelter for more than a million people around the world.

Shawn Means, with Kanawha-Putnam Habitat since 1989 and now its Executive Director, told Putnam Rotarians today that the organization places a priority on "building families."

"The house is what you see," he told the group. "But we want to build strong families as well."

The "Habitat University" offers nine classes to inform families how to care for a hose through proper maintenance, and how to live on a budget -- even neighborhood relations: how do you get along with neighbors.

"We want families to succeed," he said. Home ownership makes for stable communities, and provides a long-term solution to economic hardship.

Contrary to popular belief, Means told the group, "a home is not the most expensive thing you'll ever buy. The most expensive thing you'll pay for is the interest on the loan."

Not so with the Habitat home. The cost of a Habitat home is usually about $48,000. "The cost is low because the labor is volunteer work. With labor costs added in, the same home would be in the $75,000 range.

Home owners make monthly payments of about $250 at no interest for twenty years, and the money goes into a revolving fund to build other homes.

Since 1988, Kanawha-Putnam Habitat has built 110 houses in the valley. The Wheeling-Charleston Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church in 2000 donated a thirty-acre tract on which Habitat is building more than forty homes in a planned community. A project for twenty-seven houses is currently underway in Spring Hill.

Habitat also operates the ReStore on Piedmont Road in Charleston. The ReStore is a retail outlet which sells used and surplus building materials. Anyone can contribute, and anyone can shop there. Or anyone may volunteer to work there.

The ReStore alone has generated funding for four Habitat homes in the past six years.

Means told the story of an elderly widow with little income who lived in a home which was flooded often by ground water. She sometimes cooked in her kitchen while standing in ankle-deep water.

Then she got out of bed one morning to find water in her bedroom. The roof was leaking. "She had water from the ground and now from overhead. She had no way to move or repair her home."

Appeals to civic groups, churches, and private individuals raised the money in six weeks to build a Habitat home for her with a solid roof and sited "on top of a hill."

Habitat International says there are 100 million homeless persons in the world. There are more than a billion persons living in substandard housing.

Habitat seeks to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world with a growing ministry of volunteer labor and donated funds.

In the Kanawha Valley the mission is far from finished.

But the mission is underway.