A Hand Up
Partner family mentors build skills and lives as well as houses

By Rebekah Daniel

In late 2005, Tamanda Johnson knew she and her daughter,

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then 13, needed a better home. She had a decent job as a law clerk, but with the expensive housing market in the Hartford, Conn., area, her salary still stretched only enough to cover a run-down rental in a bad neighborhood.

A friend who owned a Habitat house encouraged Tamanda to apply, so she went to a Saturday meeting to find out more about the program. As the chairs began to fill and then the meeting became standing room only, Tamanda became frightened of so much competition. “I didn’t even fill out the application,” she says.

Though Tamanda later mustered her courage to finish the application and was accepted into the program, it wasn’t the last scary experience she would have in the emotional, hurry-up-and-wait process of buying her first house. Throughout the process, a voice of experience helped her deal with the stress of balancing a job with sweat-equity hours, frustrations at delays and bouts of anxiety about handling unfamiliar home maintenance tasks by herself. That voice? Her mentor.

“She kept encouraging me to be patient, because it’s hard when you’re getting a new house and you really don’t want to be where you’re at,” Tamanda says. A common component of the partnership process at Habitat for Humanity affiliates around the United States, a mentor can perform valuable services for both the affiliates and the homeowners-to-be. In La Crosse, Wis., mentors, also called advocates, help keep the lines of communication open.

“If we didn’t have advocates, it would just be me as executive director interacting with the families, and they would get the short end of that stick,” executive director Cori Skolaski says. “There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to spend as much time as I’d like with them.”

The La Crosse Area Habitat family support committee recruits advocates largely from area churches and personal contacts. They look for people known to be mature, compassionate and flexible. And of course, it helps if they own a house, as well.

“In a lot of cases, there is not a history of homeownership in the [partner] family, so it’s modeling homeownership,” Skolaski says. “If you own a home and something goes wrong with the plumbing, you don’t call a landlord. You buy a plunger. But if you’ve never owned a home before, how would you know?”

Education is a vital component of the mentoring program for Habitat of Baldwin County, Ala. The affiliate calls their mentors PALs, which stands for Partner/Advocate/ Liaison, and prefers that PALs have served as Habitat volunteers for at least a few years. With that level of experience, a PAL is better equipped to answer homeowner questions and really understand the program, family services director Pat Malone says.

Each homeowner family must attend 12 hours of educational workshops with the affiliate before they’re eligible to begin construction on their house, and PALs often accompany the families to the meetings. It’s not uncommon, Malone says, to see PALs and their families huddled together after a workshop, going over questions the family was too intimidated to ask in front of the larger group. Also, PALs help to foster a sense of confidence and responsibility in the new homeowners.

“Your family has to become a stakeholder,” Malone says. “Some of the families have never been a stakeholder in anything, and you have to change that.”

In nearby Huntsville, Ala., Habitat of Madison County has made a few tweaks to their PAL program over the years. Originally, the PALs were matched to homeowner families in the construction phase of the partnership. Now, the affiliate tries to connect families and PALs much earlier in the process.

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