Description of Organization

“Habitat for Humanity is a global non-profit housing charity that seeks to eliminate poverty housing. We are a Christian NGO and we build for people for all backgrounds, races and religions. Our vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. Our mission is seeking to put God’s love into action, by bringing people together to build homes, communities and hope.

Overseas, we work with vulnerable families and communities to improve their standard of living through house-building and/or repairs. Locally, we aim to improve lives of vulnerable families in Singapore by transforming their homes to a safe and sanitary state through intensive home rehabilitation.

The homeowners we work with are encouraged to invest in their new home by contributing labour and/or monetary payments, if possible – a concept we called “”Sweat Equity”” where we promote hand-up instead of hand-out.

Additionally, we have our UnLitter Red Dot programme, where we seek to nurture a society which is more civic-minded and considerate through community clean-ups all over Singapore.

We hope to achieve our mission and vision through the various overseas and local programmes that we have.”

Intended use of funds through the YFC 2023 programme

“Funds raised will go towards supporting the operations of our local programme – Project HomeWorks.

Homeowners we work with in Project HomeWorks live in pest-infested, cluttered or unhygienic housing conditions, and face multiple challenges in their health or physical abilities. Coupled with limited financial and social support, they have difficulty caring for themselves, let alone their homes. Our intensive home rehabilitation session mobilises a community of supporters coming together to help these homeowners with a combination of works like pest-elimination, decluttering or intensive cleaning so that their homes are restored to a safe and sanitary state.

Each year we serve about 200 of such households through 320 Project HomeWorks sessions. With each labour-intensive home rehabilitation session, Habitat Singapore does backend planning and logistics management, including home assessments and liaising with various professional vendors for professional fumigation services or furniture replacements. To ensure continued care to our cases, we work closely with social workers, who refer cases to us and do follow-ups after our series of intervention is completed.

We hope to use the fund raised through the YFC programme to power our reach to at least 200 households this year.”

Engaging and involving the YFC participants

To ensure that the YFC participants are able to be able to advocate for our causes, we are planning to hold a series of trainings so that they can get to know more about our organisation’s work and programmes. We will additionally engage them in direct service in at least 1 to 2 Project HomeWorks sessions so that they will be able to experience for themselves, the actual needs on the ground and the works needed to help these homeowners have a safer and more sanitary home to live in. We will also mentor them in conversations and reflections to help them process what was seen and experienced so that there is a deeper understanding of what we are trying to achieve through our activities.