Enough

Let's do it again?

Photo by Saif71.com on Unsplash

We are in the middle of a two month stretch of family celebrations. It begins with mother’s day and then rampages through Jen’s birthday, our anniversary, my birthday, father’s day and Ben’s birthday. Sam is the laggard and caps the year in September.

Who knew partying was so enervating?

Shiny, happy…in 1992

As we approach my turn at the celebratory wheel (66 on 6/6), we are busy at work…waiting.

We are waiting on:

• Finalizing our next fiscal year’s budget. It’s a complicated picture for fiscal 2026 (we operate on a July-June financial year) as we finish our current homes, transition our physical home and refocus our construction program. We are more fortunate than many smaller non-profits in that we are not, at least for now, impacted by cuts to federal funding programs. Our financial picture is stable, but the future environment is opaque, at best.

• Final approval from the local planning board on our site development plan for our new home. It’s been a more time consuming and expensive process than we’d expected (but normal in a SNAFU way), and we should be nearing the end of this process, with a public hearing next week. We need to get going so we can move by fall.

• Finding partner families for our two homes under construction. Habitat - to the surprise of many - does not give homes away. Families chosen for our programs must be able to qualify for an affordable mortgage to purchase their homes at a deep discount. The evaluation process takes time. We have a 100% success rate over 30+ years, and are determined to keep that up.

• Locating new building sites. We operate in one of the highest cost real estate markets in the northeast. Land that fits our building and zoning requirements is not only expensive, it is competitive. As real estate values have escalated, donations of buildable parcels have all but vanished. We are actively looking for sites where we can construct homes in clusters.

We are managing that which is in our control, and guiding that which is not as best we can to obtain the outcomes we need.

And so we enter June, the cusp of summer…and prepare to begin again.

Such is life. Cycles and circles and compromises.

We celebrate it all.

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald