“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” - Nelson Mandela

We are just over two weeks into closing our doors to the ReStore and suspending the build sites. Amidst this pandemic, we continue to keep all those who have been impacted by COVID-19 in our thoughts and prayers. We will persevere to continue our mission and find ways to be good stewards of our community. I will address where we are today, and what you might be able to expect in the coming weeks. 

Our dedicated and trained staff at Greater Green Bay Habitat for Humanity and ReStore have rallied together in this time of uncertainty and Covid-19, with passion and focus. We are working remotely and are using all of our energy to concentrate on the future of our organization. We will continue to work with the Habitat vision in our hearts: A world where everyone has a decent place to live.

OUR FOCUS:

1. The Health and Safety of our employees, Habitat families, volunteers and donors are our priority. Our operations are closed down, but when we reopen we will have solid plans in place to move all aspects of our organization forward. 

2. Caring and serving all our Habitat partner families. We are connecting with our Habitat families, learning of their personal situations, and working to ease their concerns as we work through this. Each family situation is different and we are here for them.

3. Working on our near-term objective with respect to our financial stability. This means researching and applying for government grants, local emergency funding, payroll protection grants, seeking new donors for ReStore products, etc.

4. The future sustainability of the organization. For the first 3 ½ months that our new store was in operation, we were experiencing considerable sales increases and were forecasting to exceed last year's sales by over $400K. That benchmark will be missed, due to the Coronavirus crisis, but rest assured we will be ready for business when it is safe for our community to join us again.

Now is a time for us all to reflect and be thankful that we have a home and, as such, must be grateful for it. On the other hand please take time to remember those who don't have a home and know that our prayers and efforts are for them. And as Nelson Mandela (quoted above) states, we will continue to work with hope in our hearts.

Be safe, be well and stay home!

Sincerely,

Cora Haltaufderheid, Executive Director                 Email Cora: corah@greenbayhabitat.org

Thank you to everyone for your patience, understanding and support! We are humbled to see the support of communities coming together for the greater good, and even though we sincerely miss you right now, we know it’s going to take the effort of everyone to get through this public health crisis together. We will continue to suspend volunteering for the build sites, events and the ReStore until officials have determined it is publicly safe to reopen. Among the events that are affected will be Women Build and Faith build. We have not cancelled these events and registration is still open, but it is likely that we will have to adjust dates for volunteer build site days when we have more information.

And we’ll briefly review what we know about the Cellcom Marathon. At this time, we have limited information, but understand that the race will now become “virtual”. This means, there will be no single gathering of runners or spectators. Being a virtual race, runners will still be able to run, they’ll just complete their miles on their own. Also, that means we will not need volunteers this year for the event specifically. When we find out more information, we’ll be sure to correspond with anyone who signed up to volunteer.

We continue to be amazed and find comfort in partners and organizations like Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Green Bay Packers who have created COVID-19 Relief Funds. If you know of a company or organization within Brown County looking to help with funding, please send an email to mharper@greenbayhabitat.org.