It's our 8th birthday!
Hello Folks,
It’s our birthday! You’re reading this almost exactly 8 years since Houses into Homes made our first bed delivery, on February 2nd, 2018. Since then we’ve delivered 3,747 beds to 2,203 households, helping 6,647 of our neighbors live in greater comfort and stability. We’ve done that while diverting countless tons of furniture (over 2,000 tons, or roughly 150 semi-loads full) from our landfill.
It’s not only the number of households and pounds of furniture we measure: we’ve spent most of those years collecting data on the individual and family effects as well. And not just on what might be considered the direct impact of having a bed to sleep on (in our most recent cohort, 86% of adults report better sleep and 85% say their child is sleeping better). We also measure secondary impacts like the sense of community belonging, work and school performance, parent-child relationships, and overall stress. Spoiler alert: all are remarkably improved after furniture delivery.
Together we are improving lives, and those improvements are rippling out all throughout the community. And the best part is we’re just getting started. This month Houses into Homes became a founding member of Furnish Together, a national coalition of furniture banks working to bring awareness to the issue of furniture poverty. If you saw the map of our deliveries from our December newsletter you know that furniture poverty exists in every neighborhood and in the homes of neighbors from all walks of life. That’s true nationwide, and the research we’ve done is helping inform the work of furniture banks everywhere. In part because of our community, home furnishings in the US will soon be widely recognized as a basic need, and furniture poverty will soon be widely understood as a problem that can be sustainably and economically addressed.
Of course, the wider you make the aperture and the bigger the numbers get, the harder it can be to truly understand the humanity of the work. So I’ll leave you with a quote from literally the most recent of those 2,203 deliveries, completed this past Thursday. This text is from the mother in a family of four, with two young daughters living in the same North Liberty neighborhood I lived in for three years prior to moving to Iowa City:
“We would like to thank the volunteers and Houses into Homes. You have changed our lives today. It’s been months since we felt the joy we felt today. Thank you kindly for everything you guys do”
I can’t think of a more meaningful birthday present than this! And so, like any eight-year-old after their birthday party, some thank you cards are in order for the countless gifts shared as we head into year nine:
To all of the item donors who made this delivery possible: Thank you for trusting us to care for your gently-used furniture once its usefulness in your own life has passed.
To all of the volunteers who contributed to this delivery: Thank you for offering up your valuable time and expertise to refurbish, sort, inventory, select, and deliver a full household of furnishings to yet another fellow neighbor.
To this family: Thank you for welcoming us into your space and trusting us to help transform it, and for giving new life to many well-loved local furnishings.
May this new home be a wellspring of comfort, rest, togetherness, and joy for many years to come. For the family inside and the community that literally and figuratively surrounds it. Welcome to our ever-growing neighborhood!
Together we make it home.
-Ian