Nobody hired us, and the yard was full
Tellus Design and Build was a working construction firm in Southern California, and by 2007 it had jobs running in the same counties where Habitat for Humanity's chapters were building homes. I ran the firm. Habitat's model is the closest thing in nonprofit housing to a general contractor's own. Families build at cost, on donated material and donated skilled labor. A firm with trucks, supplier accounts, crews and an estimating desk can give to that model in a way a check cannot. So from February 2007 we did. Surplus material off active jobs went to chapters instead of the dumpster or the back of our yard. We bid Habitat work. We put crews on Habitat builds. When a chapter needed a construction opinion it could not pay for, it called us and we gave it.
The people on the other side of that were chapter staff and volunteer coordinators in Santa Barbara, Orange County and Los Angeles. Donated material has to be received, sorted, stored and matched to the standard plan the chapter builds from, and every one of those steps is done by a small paid staff and a rotating bench of volunteers. A pallet of a product that does not fit the plan set is not a gift to them. It is a storage problem with a donor's name on it.
Most construction firms frame community giving as a budget question. The question is how much the firm can afford to give this year, and to whom. That puts the whole constraint on the donor's side, and for the first years of this relationship I framed it that way too. What the chapters actually needed was a donor who tracked their capacity instead of his own generosity. We did not have that rule when we started. The chapters taught it to us.
They started saying no, and that was the information
It did not arrive as one conversation. A chapter would take less than it had the year before. An offer that would once have been accepted without a thought got a polite pass. Then it happened again, in a different county. The chapters had reached the point where the donated material coming in, from us and from other donors, was more than they could use, and they had the standing to be selective about what they accepted. That is a good problem for a nonprofit to have. It is also a signal a donor has to read correctly, because the ordinary reading is wrong.
The ordinary reading is that the relationship has run its course. They are not taking what you give, so the giving is done. Wind it down, or send the material to a chapter that still wants it. It is a fair reading aimed at the wrong side of the table. What had filled up was the chapter's yard, not the chapter's need for a builder.
Once I looked at it from their side, the things we had been giving stopped being one thing called giving. Material is a stock. It has to be stored and sorted before it is worth anything, so a chapter's capacity for it is finite, and it fills on the chapter's schedule, not the donor's. Bid work, crew labor and consulting are flows. They are consumed the day they are delivered and nothing is left in the yard afterward, so their ceiling is the chapter's ability to supervise and schedule the work, which is a different and much higher limit. We had been pushing the one channel that saturates and reading its saturation as the end of the relationship, while the channels that do not saturate had barely been touched.
When the people you are helping decline twice, you are giving them the wrong thing.
That is the rule I kept, and it is not specific to construction. The answer to a ceiling the recipient controls is a different kind of giving, one that does not depend on their storage.
How I came at this one
The first question was what the gift looked like from the chapter's side, since a donation the recipient has to store is a cost to them before it is a benefit. That question fit because the chapters had told us, in the plainest way a recipient can, that the limit sat with them and not with our budget. The second question was which of the things we gave got consumed on delivery and which had to be warehoused, and that split is the whole method.