It started with a single column of smoke. The stream of gray connected the floor of Rist Canyon with the wide Colorado sky. Three weeks later, the 2012 High Park fire finally extinguished after burning more than 87,000 acres of land, destroying more than 250 homes and claiming one life.

By the time Candace was allowed to return to her neighborhood, there was nothing left to salvage. Heaps of ash and bent metal marked where her house once stood. In the months that followed, Candace, her three children Chase, Jackson and Adele and their dog, Cooper, jumped from place to place, couch to couch. While the insurance process dragged on, Candace, a preschool teacher, continued to make mortgage payments on a home that didn’t exist. “We were going to have to walk away from everything — from this place that we loved, our life here,” she says.

Then, on Mother’s Day 2013, almost a year after losing everything, Candace received a call from Fort Collins Habitat. She learned that she would be going home again — her community would be helping her build a new house on her land in the canyon. “It was the best Mother’s Day gift I could ever get because it was the best gift I could give my kids,” Candace says.

As construction began, crews of volunteers as well as friends and family joined Candace as she invested hundreds of sweat equity hours into the work. She was eager because, despite all that was lost in the fire, Candace felt like she was gaining so much more. An affordable mortgage that she would no longer struggle to cover. A newfound appreciation among her family for life and for each other. A community that caught her when she felt like her family was falling. The foundation of a stable and safe home to lift them back up as they started anew.

“They built more than our home,” Candace says, sitting in the living room of her now-finished Habitat home. “They helped us rebuild our lives.”

A quarter of the people in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, live below the poverty line — the highest rate of any American city. Compared to other East Coast cities, however, Philadelphia boasts a high homeownership rate, even among low-income families, due to the mass production of row homes for working-class families prior to World War II.

The convergence of these two realities leaves many Philadelphians unable to afford the upkeep of their homes, and deferred maintenance often snowballs into more expensive and serious issues. Dilapidated porches lead to injuries from falls. Leaking roofs spur mold, then asthma. Broken pipes cause unsafe water or no running water at all.

In 2010, Habitat Philadelphia began a home repair program to address the growing issue. Working alongside homeowners and volunteers, they complete the critical repairs that help preserve affordable homeownership while improving health and safety. In order to apply for the program, residents must provide proof of homeownership to ensure that Habitat’s work is permitted and benefits the intended recipient. This, it turns out, is a hurdle for the more than 14,000 Philadelphians with “tangled titles.”

These residents live in homes that they cannot prove they own on paper.

“There are many reasons for tangled titles,” says KC Roney, Habitat Philadelphia’s senior director of programs. Lack of a will is the main one. “In many neighborhoods in Philadelphia, there is a lot of multigenerational homeownership. And so much of this inability to establish ownership stems from an unclear line of succession of the house between family members.”

In 2018, to help applicants navigate the legal process of untangling, Habitat Philadelphia began to refer homeowners to Drexel University’s Andy and Gwen Stern Community Lawyering Clinic. Each year, a new class of law students serves the clinic by working with and advocating for local residents on a number of legal topics, including property deeds. The law students assist residents in tracking down heirs to resolve disputes and filing petitions in court. Then they help put more permanent solutions in place.

“We assist community members with their individual cases, but we also try to identify holistic and systemic solutions that can resolve issues before they become entrenched legal problems,” says Rachel López, associate professor of law and director of the Community Lawyering Clinic. “Community legal education and will creation, in this instance, are critical to that.”

To the homeowners, the impact of the clinic’s work goes beyond a piece of paper. In addition to Habitat Philadelphia’s repair program, the home’s title also unlocks homestead exemptions on property taxes, payment assistance plans, utility relief programs and equity. “Getting the title resolved provides a clean slate. Giving homeowners broad access to resources and programs, even outside of Habitat, to help them stay in their homes, to age in place,” Roney says.

With each streetlight that went out in the Canaan community north of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ruthiana felt less and less safe. There were simply no qualified workers in the neighborhood to repair the lamps, so the once well-lit streets became pitch dark at nightfall.

The residents of Canaan, an informal settlement of families displaced by the deadly 2010 earthquake, live in difficult conditions, often with no running water, electricity or access to basic infrastructure. The solar-powered streetlamps were originally installed through a partnership between Habitat Haiti and the national and local governments. In all, Habitat installed 200 energy-efficient streetlamps in capital-area neighborhoods and now is working to create a pool of qualified residents in each neighborhood to maintain them.

This summer, Habitat began conducting trainings in conjunction with a local partner. Ruthiana, who is studying to be a civil engineer, was among the first 19 participants. Each participant received hands-on training and a toolkit to test electrical currents; neighborhood clusters were supplied with ladders. Habitat plans to duplicate the project in Simon Pele, Port-de-Paix, Saint Louis du Nord, Gros Morne and in the Grand’ Anse area.

In Canaan, street vendors report that they now feel comfortable doing business after nightfall. Public transportation drivers, meanwhile, are able to start their shifts before dawn and continue after sunset. Children gather beneath the lights, some of them studying in their glow. “It is important for me to understand how these solar streetlights work because they help my whole neighborhood,” Ruthiana says. “If one of them breaks down, I can help my community by fixing it.”

It was 1942, and on the outskirts of the rural South Georgia town of Americus, a radical experiment began. The farm was called Koinonia, and it was to be a first-century version of Christian living in a 20th-century context. It would be a place where everyone — no matter race, gender or wealth — would be welcomed. The guiding principle would be the New Testament concept of koinonia: fellowship, sharing communion.

Koinonia Farm was the culmination of the lifelong passions of farmer and biblical scholar Clarence Jordan. On that farm, among rows of pecan trees, after years of struggles caused by boycotts and persecution, the seeds for Habitat for Humanity were sown.

With Koinonia’s roots of racial and economic equality informing the foundation of Habitat’s mission, Jordan’s vision of equality continues to inspire and compel Habitat’s work. “Even though people about us choose the path of hate and violence and warfare and greed and prejudice, we who are Christ’s body must throw off these poisons and let love permeate and cleanse every tissue and cell. Nor are we to allow ourselves to become easily discouraged when love is not always obviously successful or pleasant,” preached Jordan during a sermon titled “The Substance of Faith.”

“Love never quits, even when an enemy has hit you on the right cheek and you have turned the other, and he’s also hit that.”

A path defined

Born in 1912 in Talbotton, Georgia, into a relatively privileged and prominent family, Jordan became aware of economic and racial inequality at an early age. His boyhood home was next to a local jail, and he saw firsthand the inhumane treatment disproportionately endured by Black men there. He observed the unjust sharecropping practices that kept his poorest neighbors, both Black and white, poor, tethered to their stubborn parcel of land and trapped in an endless cycle of debt and poverty.

Jordan dreamed of helping families break that cycle. He planned to become a farmer himself. He would teach others techniques and technologies to help increase their harvests and, in turn, their quality of life.

So, in 1929, he enrolled in the University of Georgia’s College of Agriculture. But during his senior year, immersed in his studies and his faith, Jordan’s views shifted. He came to believe that the roots of poverty were not just economic, but spiritual, too — inspiring him to shift from a solely agrarian-focused path to a mission-driven one.

In 1933, after college and during the height of the Great Depression, Jordan began seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Low on funds but not passion, he worked several jobs while obtaining his divinity degree and, later, his doctorate in New Testament Greek from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Jordan assisted at several Black churches in the city’s West End. He taught and led prayer meetings at Simmons University (now Simmons College of Kentucky), a historically Black college in the city. He served as the director of the Baptist Fellowship Center, working closely with low-income residents.

According to Dallas Lee, a student and friend of Jordan, some of these were Black farmers who had abandoned their faltering livelihoods and migrated to the city in hopes of better economic success. It was these relationships, Lee says, that rekindled Jordan’s dream of helping farmers succeed. “The cumulation of all of this mission work and religious work, particularly his belief that anti-racism had a Biblical foundation, influenced Jordan greatly,” explains Tracy K’Meyer, professor of history at University of Louisville. “After seminary, he felt compelled to put those findings and his beliefs into something tangible.”

After graduation, Jordan and his wife, Florence, a library assistant whom he met and married while in Louisville, returned to southern Georgia. There, in 1942, alongside Baptist minister Martin England, they planted that dream in rural, predominantly Black Sumter County, helping it grow into Koinonia Farm.

Faith in action

In the first several years, the Jordans, England and residing families — about a quarter of whom were Black — worked to establish the 400-acre farm. They were guided by three principles: All possessions were to be held in common. All were to practice nonviolence. All were to be recognized as equal under God.

“The families who came to Koinonia to live in community were searching for a way of life that mirrored their idea of the early church — of sharing things in common, of being there for one another,” says Jordan’s son, Lenny. “It was a bold undertaking, and it wasn’t easy.”

The group experimented with different modern farming techniques and equipment to reduce issues and increase yields. They sold produce in farm stands to establish a base of support locally and started a newsletter to recruit supporters and residents nationally. Side by side, Black and white residents farmed, worshipped and ate together.

By the mid-1950s, as their efforts gained traction, so too did the backlash. With the farm’s ideals and Jordan’s attempt to help two local Black residents enroll in a previously segregated Atlanta business college, they faced intense hostility. Farm equipment was destroyed, hundreds of fruit trees cut down, bullets fired at the communal dwellings, and explosives tossed into one of the farm’s roadside stands. The hate streamed at them from both hooded Klansmen and plain-clothes citizens alike.

Businesses in and around Sumter County enacted a nearly complete boycott against Koinonia. They refused to buy their products or sell them supplies. Local businesses removed all signs advertising the farm, and their insurance company canceled their policy without warning. Customers dropped from the egg route — the farm’s principal source of income at the time — leaving them with several thousand hens and exponentially more eggs.

Speaking years later of the dangers he faced at this time, Jordan acknowledged the risks he, his friends and his family faced. “It scared us, but the alternative was not to do it, and that scared us more.”

The community remained committed to the work, borrowing money to invest in machinery to begin a larger scale pecan processing and packaging operation. They relied on out-of-state orders placed through their national newsletter to bypass the local boycott, advertising under the slogan, “Help us get the nuts out of Georgia.”

By the late 1950s, Jordan wrote in the monthly newsletter that Koinonia now had thousands of pecan customers across the world and not one within Sumter County. The dream survived, if only just barely.

Throughout the 1960s, the farm’s population dwindled as agriculture grew less promising as a livelihood. The few remaining members and residents of Koinonia Farm were active in the civil rights movement, working with like-minded allies in Albany and Sumter counties and providing housing for civil rights workers visiting the area.

While pleased with the advancement of civil rights during this time, the group recognized the systemically racist economic barriers that kept many Black families from fully reaching equality. In one Koinonia newsletter, Jordan wrote that while having the door opened to Black Americans was one thing, having money to spend once inside was also important. The struggle for economic emancipation remained, he said.

A new chapter

Coming from humble beginnings in Alabama, Millard Fuller became a self-made millionaire at age 29. Looking for something more and inspired by a visit to Koinonia, he and his wife, Linda, sold their possessions and began searching for a new focus for their lives. This search led them and their children to move to the farm.

There, Jordan and Fuller pushed each other to think more deeply and more creatively about the injustices of the world and how they could help tear down those barriers that they agreed were keeping Black families from achieving economic equity.

Together, they developed the concept of “partnership housing” — whereby those in need of adequate shelter would work alongside volunteers to build affordable houses. The houses would be built at no profit. Homeowners would pay no-interest loans over a 20-year period. Those payments, along with money earned by fundraising, would create “The Fund for Humanity,” a revolving fund which would enable the continual construction of homes for more families.

The purpose of the fund, Jordan wrote, was “to provide a means through which the possessed may share with and invest in the dispossessed.” The response from their community of supporters was overwhelming and enthusiastic. Land holdings and farm business increased, investments in the housing program grew, and construction crews broke ground.

“There was a stark divide between the quality of Black housing and white housing at the time, even if they earned the same. And housing affects everything you do in life, even your view in life,” Lenny Jordan says of the decision to focus on homes. “All of Koinonia put a ton of energy behind it because it was a way to improve lives, improve equality — both right away and over the long run.”

In the spring of 1969, the Jordans traveled to Ghana. While there, they provided $500 in seed money for a Ghanaian Fund for Humanity, a similar revolving fund to the one at Koinonia whereby families could access funding for home improvements and business projects. Even before the first home in Sumter County had been completed, the impact had spread halfway around the world.

An enduring legacy

That fall, back on the farm, Jordan was working on a sermon in his writing shack, nestled among the pecan trees when he suffered a heart attack and died suddenly. He was 57. Less than two weeks later, the first home built by The Fund for Humanity was completed — a seed of change that Jordan had so staunchly believed in.

Joseph “Bo” Johnson, one of the first members of the Koinonia community, moved into the home with his family. He and his wife, Emma, faithfully repaid their home loan each month — $25 at a time —for the next 20 years. In 1973, the Fullers took the Fund for Humanity concept to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. And in 1976, Habitat for Humanity was founded. In 1989, the Johnsons celebrated the final payment with a mortgage burning ceremony at Koinonia.

Today, with Habitat’s help, families of all races, creeds and backgrounds build and improve places to call home in all 50 U.S. states and 70 countries worldwide. We engage millions of volunteers, advocates and supporters like you, who help families tap into economic equity and prosperity. Who help realize Jordan’s dream by embodying the love that never quits.

Nearly 80 years after its founding, Koinonia Farm is still active and carrying out Jordan’s vision.

Much of this information on Clarence Jordan’s life and legacy came from friends and family of Jordan and Koinonia, as well as the following sources:

• Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm by Tracy K’Meyer
• The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment (1942-1970) by Dallas Lee
• Restructuring Southern Society: The Radical Vision of Koinonia Farm by Andrew S. Chancey