If you partner with Twin Cities Habitat for home repairs, you’ll get to know America Lindgren. As the A Brush with Kindness Program Coordinator, America is with homeowners from start to finish on their home repair journey—from ensuring applications are complete to signing off on the completed project. And while she coordinates projects with families from a distance, she knows first-hand the trials and tribulations of trying to preserve and adapt a home.

For a nonprofit innovation can be tricky. Unbridled goodwill can result in ineffective mission creep if you’re not careful. But nonprofits that don’t innovate, just like businesses that don’t, run the risk of becoming obsolete.

Allie Berg joined Twin Cities Habitat to find a way to put her faith into action, which just happens to be one of our core values. She started as a Faith Relations intern, and discovered a passion for working directly with families who partner with Twin Cities Habitat. Now, she oversees all of Twin Cities Habitat’s outreach and intake processes, and families are front and center in her mind each day.

With a degree in English and a background in magazine publishing, you might not expect someone like Mike Robertson to be leading our A Brush with Kindness (ABWK) home repair team—but he's doing that, and much more!

Chester: an Army Veteran in need of some repair work so he could stay in his longtime home.

Josh: a Senior Operations Manager at Allianz and co-chair of Allianz’s Operation: SERVE, looking for a way to support local veterans so they can stay in their homes as they grow older.

They both found Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity’s A Brush With Kindness paint and repair program. With additional funding and support from the Home Depot Foundation and the City of Minneapolis, it was a perfect match.

Although Habitat for Humanity is probably best known for our homebuilding and homeownership programs and services, we also offer Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention support for residents of Minneapolis, and health and safety repair services for existing low-income homeowners in the Twin Cities metro area through our A Brush with Kindness (ABWK) program.

Even being around Mary for a short period of time, I can say that she is surely a warm, welcoming, funny, and humble human being... with maybe just a touch of spitfire in her, too. Mary has lived in Minnesota nearly all her life after moving here from Mississippi when she was a young girl. She has owned her house in Minneapolis for 57 years, which is also home to Mary's son, her sister, and her brother. 

When John and his wife Linda take a look at their house now, they are amazed by the many improvements they see thanks to the repairs done by Twin Cities Habitat's A Brush With Kindness (ABWK) program.  

Picking and choosing what home projects to tackle and what will remain on the "to do" list, is a common struggle that many homeowners wrestle with. For Lasha and her family, that decision became even more critical, as they pursued insurance options for their home. After conversations with their insurance provider, it quickly became clear that priority number one for the family would have to be repairs to their roof.

Guest Blog contributed by a St. Paul homeowner & A Brush with Kindness client

My husband and I have been employed, paid taxes, paid bills, paid rent, given to charities and supported ourselves since our middle teen-age years. We are now 60 and 56-years-old, respectively. B and I have been together since 1989. We have no children, but are close to our families in Minnesota and Ohio.