A home is where you spend Christmas, where you sleep through the night without cold air slipping in through broken windows. A home is where homework happens at the kitchen table, where families can cook, rest, feel safe, and dream together.
Without decent housing, everything becomes harder. Health, education, stability, and even relationships suffer. That is why Hope Builds in Romania, unique volunteer house-building events, are so important.
Over the past year, Habitat for Humanity worked alongside volunteers who contributed nearly 42,000 hours’ worth of time, skills and energy to improve housing conditions in communities across Africa. Today, we highlight how volunteering continues to shape individuals, strengthen community connections, and inspire long-term civic engagement.
Volunteering has a unique power to build team spirit, create shared memories, and fill people with a real sense of accomplishment. It pulls us away from screens and routines and places us into something deeply human, working side by side, learning from one another, and becoming a community.
This same power has been visible across Romania over the past three years. From 2023 to 2025, Habitat for Humanity Romania organized six Hope Builds, bringing people together from Romania and beyond. These volunteer construction events unite teams, strangers, colleagues, and friends to build homes for families facing difficult socioeconomic and family situations.
At Habitat for Humanity, volunteering takes on many shapes. Not every volunteer may swing a hammer, but every volunteer helps move us closer to a world where everyone has a decent place to live.
In just the first half of 2025, more than 3,300 people volunteered with Habitat for Humanity across Europe and the Middle East. Some helped build homes in Romania, Kenya, and Malawi. Others organized charity dinners in Poland, sorted donated goods in Irish ReStores, ran upcycling workshops in Great Britain, or supported communications and events in Jordan and Egypt. No two roles are alike. There is something for everyone who is willing to help.
Across Africa and the Global South, climate change is transforming the way communities move, settle, and survive. Droughts, floods, and environmental degradation are pushing families from rural areas into cities at unprecedented rates — and urban informal settlements are absorbing the shock.
In November, Habitat for Humanity contributed to critical conversations shaping the future of climate migration, urban resilience, and community-driven adaptation.
Poland’s housing challenge is often framed as a problem of shortage. Yet across the country, thousands of buildings stand empty or underused—many of them publicly owned—while access to affordable housing remains out of reach for low-income households and vulnerable groups. This contradiction lies at the center of a new research (August 2025) study exploring how non-residential vacancies could become part of the solution.
Across England, Scotland, and Wales, the housing crisis continues to deepen. Record levels of homelessness, rising temporary accommodation costs, and a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable homes are placing enormous pressure on households and local authorities alike. At the same time, thousands of buildings—many of them publicly owned—sit vacant or underused, representing a missed opportunity to respond more quickly and sustainably to housing need.
Tanzania Mortgage Refinance Company (TMRC) signed a memorandum of understanding with Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) in August 2022 to engage in an effort to promote the ability of TMRC in unpacking the potential of Housing Microfinance (HMF) in Tanzania and supporting TMRC to develop and expand its commercial relationships with low-income consumers as a means of increasing their access to affordable and quality housing solutions, a first step in the organizations’ joint-effort to expand and strengthen the low-income housing finance sector in Tanzania.
On Monday, 8 September, renovation works began at 1 Nadarzyńska Street, led by a team of 21 employee volunteers from Australia, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Swapping their work places for paint rollers, the group traded business attire for hard hats and work clothes, following safety training before diving into four days of hands-on renovation.
NAIROBI, October 15, 2025 — A new initiative funded by the Swiss Capacity Building Facility (SCBF) is set to improve access to affordable housing finance and insurance solutions for low and middle income households in Kenya. The solutions propose to use home improvement as a pathway to enhance climate resilience and lower the disease burden of malaria and other climate induced health illnesses