>> If your goal is to build houses > Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? >> if it's to recruit lifetime donors > Which is not the goal of Hab

>> If your goal is to build houses > Which is the goal of Habitat for Humanity, correct? >> if it's to recruit lifetime donors > Which is not the goal of Habitat for Humanity, right? It's only a means to an end. The end is building homes for people. If that end can be accomplished by a means more efficient than "recruit lifetime donors", shouldn't it be done that way? But it can't. You can't hire these hypothetical teams of cheaper local builders when you have no money. Also, people are forgetting that Habitat for Humanity also builds homes domestically. I've volunteered for one of those jobs, once. My understanding the labor was split between 1) future occupant sweat equity, 2) unskilled volunteer labor (me), 3) volunteer skilled labor (people in building trades). I knew someone who worked for a similar charity, that sent emergency food to areas where children were starving. They have volunteers run little assembly lines for two hour stretches where they manually mix and pack the food. That work could be easily automated, but if they did that, they'd have no money to buy food for the machines to pack, or to ship it where it's needed. That's because the corporations that sponsor the packing events (where they get most of their revenue) are far more interested in feel-good team-building exercises than actually feeding starving children. I don't think it's quite so bad with individual donors (who don't have pockets as deep as corporations), but it's quite clear that getting the donors involved increases their engagement significantly. There's a big difference between sending a check and being there than just sending a check. The focus on first order efficiency is fatally ignorant of actual human psychology.