Millard Fuller, Habit for Humanity founder, dies
February 3, 2009 at 11:36 am by Scott Henry in News
Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller died early this morning. He was 74. He’d gotten his start building homes for the poor at Koinonia Farm, a radical liberal Christian commune outside Americus (which just happens to be one of the first places I visited shortly after moving to Georgia some 20 years back).
Founded by Clarence Jordan in 1942, Koinonia was a multi-racial community at a time when that wasn’t cool with many whites in the pre-Civil Rights-era Deep South.
Fuller, a millionaire businessman from Alabama, and his wife Linda joined Koinonia in the late ’60s after giving away their wealth and devoting themselves to Christian service.
Inspired by Jordan, but equipped with an entreprenuer’s business sense, Fuller launched Koinonia Partnership Housing, which built simple homes using donated materials and volunteer labor and sold them, interest-free, to the families of poor black sharecroppers who lived nearby.
After the program proved sustainable in Georgia, the Fullers took their work to Zaire and finally launched Habitat for Humanity in 1976. The group has built more than 300,000 houses around the world, and counts a Nobel Peace Prize-winner as its most visible advocate, but its headquarters are still located in Americus.
From the Associated Press:
The son of a widower farmer in the cotton-mill town of Lanett, Ala., Fuller earned his first profit at age 6, selling a pig. While studying law at the University of Alabama, he formed a direct-marketing company with Morris Dees — later founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center — focusing on selling cookbooks and candy to high school chapters of the Future Homemakers of America. That business would make them millionaires before they were 30….
Founded in 1976, Habitat’s first headquarters was a tiny gray frame house on Americus’ Church Street, which doubled as Fuller’s law office. For the first 14 years, Fuller’s salary was just $15,000; his wife worked 10 years for free.
(Photo courtesy of the Fuller Center for Housing)
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Damned evil businessmen. :-)