Founded in 1976 by lawyer and businessman Millard Fuller, Habitat for Humanity has hand-built nearly a million affordable homes for more than four million people. The 1988 Whitney Young Award recognized the organization’s successful approach to housing—the involving of future occupants in the construction process, the building of homes with donated materials and volunteer labor, and the selling of completed houses to participating families at cost.

 

“We want to be a conscience to eliminate poverty housing in the United States and the world over,” Fuller told Parade Magazine in 1986. “This is the richest country in the world, and it’s a shame and disgrace when over 20 million of our citizens live in subhuman conditions or, in many instances, have nowhere to live at all.”

 

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter became Habitat’s high-profile supporter in the mid-1980s, joining the board of directors and helping to expand the organization’s global reach. “Habitat for Humanity has successfully removed the stigma of charity by substituting it with a sense of partnership,” said Carter in the Parade interview. “The people who will live in the homes work side by side with the volunteers so they feel very much that they are on an equal level.”