Dear Friends,

On the last day of December 2024, Habitat team members sat with a homebuyer named Rosa as she signed her Habitat mortgage. After more than a year of walking alongside and finding support in the Habitat team, buying her home was the last step in Rosa’s homeownership journey. The next day, the first day of 2025, Rosa woke for the first time as a homeowner. Just like Rosa, the Greater Des Moines Habitat for Humanity team entered this year with a lot to celebrate. Last year was one of superlatives, as you’ll see throughout this report:

• 41 households become homeowners through GDM Habitat for Humanity, the most ever
• Those homeowners helped us reach a big milestone: 500 homeownership opportunities created since our affiliate’s inception
• 204 households across Polk, Dallas, and Jasper counties received critical home repairs at a depth we’ve never achieved before: we were able to invest more than three times more per home to maintain safety, stability, and comfort for those homeowners
• Our Homeownership Services team implemented a new vision for mortgage readiness consultations with a design intended to provide everyone who meets with our counselors with their best path to homeownership

In every aspect of fulfilling our mission, 2024 was a year of big, meaningful impact. And, while our team orchestrated higher efficiency and smarter processes to realize those results, we were also squarely focused on a future of even greater impact.

At the Key Awards this September, key volunteers joined us to literally lift up the total raised to support the Framing Our Future campaign: $10,827,110 on that date and past $11 million as of today, exceeding our $10.5 million goal. The priorities outlined in the Framing Our Future campaign remain our prime guideposts, and those funds are already powering major initiatives like our 48-home development at Walnut Crossing (learn more later in this report).

At GDM Habitat for Humanity, we know we need to do more. There are so many Rosas in the workforce across our community for whom the price of homeownership is out of reach.  A little hand-up in partnership with Habitat for Humanity becomes the difference maker for that homebuyer and their future generations. In 2025, we are focused on helping even more of our neighbors create, preserve, and champion homeownership. I hope you share our vision and are ready to join us to help house our workforce.

Lance Henning
Chief Executive Officer

Jump to…

“Blitz Builds create a sense of community and high energy.  It is a way that our affiliate and construction team can accelerate the build process on multiple houses at one time while bringing together supporters from all over our community – volunteers, corporate partners, elected officials, neighbors, and more.  The Carter Court Blitz this past October was no exception.

We had a goal to stand walls and frame 5 of the initial 8 houses during the week, standing trusses on only a couple.  With the help of hundreds of volunteers and more than a dozen Habitat staff, we were able to frame all 8 of them by weeks end and had trusses up on 5 of the 8 houses!

Carter Court is a special undertaking for Habitat: it’s a totally new development that our team is taking from infrastructure to construction to final sale of 15 total homes. The Blitz kicked off our above-ground work in this brand new neighborhood, and our team is hard at work taking them from framed to finished as I write this.”

— Les Stohs, Director of Construction Services

Carter Court At a Glance:

• 15 new homeownership opportunities

• 17 adults & 28 kids will call these houses home

• 4 new house plans

• 407 volunteers took part in the Blitz Build

• All homes are slated to close between March and July 2025

This past fall, we celebrated a huge milestone for the Framing Our Future campaign: generous donors had helped us surpass our campaign goal of $10.5 million. Volunteers stood on stage at the Key Awards and lifted the individual digits of our then-total: $10,827,110 (as of today, the campaign has surpassed $11 million). The crowd of Habitat supporters, volunteers, and staff in attendance cheered for a mission accomplished, but for many of us on the team, the completion of the campaign didn’t finish our work – it kicked us into overdrive.

My team is focused on identifying, acquiring, and preparing the land on which Habitat homes will be built. Whether it’s a single lot or a six-acre tract, we’re responsible for getting things started. Framing Our Future provided us with an influx of the resources we needed to do our work. Here’s what we’ve done with it so far:

• We acquired land for Carter Court
  • 4.2 acres of undeveloped land
  • Located in Northeastern Des Moines
  • Successfully developed as a 15-home subdivision
  • All homes will be purchased with affordable mortgages in 2025
• We worked with the City of Waukee to move Walnut Crossing forward
  • 5.56 acres of suburban property
  • Located in Waukee at the corner of Warrior Lane and Douglas
  • Our development plan includes 48 townhomes
  • The site plan has been approved by the city
  • We’re moving forward with the infrastructure work that precedes construction
• We acquired property for our next big development
  • 1.7 acres in Des Moines, with more details to be released this year
  • We’re working on plans for approximately 24 townhomes
  • This will be our first major urban development since the completion of the Birdland Pocket Neighborhood in 2019

Keep an eye out over the next couple of years to watch our progress on these big initiatives that will make a big impact.

— Ryan Doyle, Real Estate & Land Development Manager