How Jimmy Carter helped build 4,390 homes with Habitat for Humanity

When Jimmy Carter was hospitalized after he fell and hit his forehead on a sharp edge at his Georgia home in 2019, there was immediate concern for the health of the longest-living former president. But as Carter emphasized the next day in Nashville, he had homes to build.

More than a dozen stitches, a black eye and a large bandage on the 95-year-old’s head did not stop him or his wife, Rosalynn, from building new porches for 21 homes in the city as part of their volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization focused on affordable housing. Video of Habitat for Humanity’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project that week showed the former president focused as he drilled nails into boards and helped build one of the thousands of homes worldwide that he and his wife had worked on for more than 35 years.

“They took 14 stitches in my forehead and my eye is black, as you’ve noticed,” he told reporters in October 2019. “But I had a No. 1 priority and that was to come to Nashville and build houses.”

In the decades since he left the White House, Carter used his own hammer and tool belt to help build, renovate or repair 4,390 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, the organization said. In the process, Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, made his volunteer work building affordable and decent housing a significant part of his legacy.

“When we left the White House, we could have done anything,” Carter once said, according to Habitat for Humanity. “But our choice was to volunteer as Habitat workers, and that’s been a life-changing experience for us.”

Habitat for Humanity CEO Jonathan T.M. Reckford told The Washington Post that while Carter did not found or run the organization, “in many ways he put us on the map.” Reckford said it’s hard to separate the former president from the growth of Habitat for Humanity, which went from helping a few thousand people a year when Carter started working with the group to helping 7.1 million people in 2022.

“All around the world, people heard about Habitat and leaders got involved because of his example,” Reckford said. “That model of serving done in the image of a former president of the United States grabbed people in a powerful way that they hadn’t seen before.”

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Habitat for Humanity had been around for only a few years before Carter’s involvement brought worldwide attention to the nonprofit. Its origin story began in 1965, when Millard and Linda Fuller were on their way to New York and made a stop at Koinonia Farm, a small, interracial, Christian farming community in Sumter County, Ga. They worked with biblical scholar Clarence Jordan to develop the concept of “partnership housing,” in which volunteers and people in need of shelter worked together to build housing at no profit. That idea was at the core of Habitat for Humanity, which the Fullers founded in 1976.

It did not take long for the Carters to support Habitat, which is based only a few miles from their home in Americus, Ga. But it wasn’t until 1984, when Carter had a speaking engagement at a New York church, that the family became even more hands-on.

Carter remembered that when he jogged by a Habitat “build” on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which was the organization’s first project in a large city, he thought to himself, “Rosalynn and I should come up and give them a hand,” according to the nonprofit. Carter visited the six-story red-brick building at 742 East Sixth Street on April 1, 1984, and saw that the tenement had spray-painted windows and a fire-blackened room that was knee-deep in garbage, reported the New York Times.

“Well, I can see you’ve got some work to do,” Carter said to the volunteer workers.

Five months later, in September 1984, the Carters led dozens of volunteers on a 27-hour bus ride from Georgia to New York to work on a Lower East Side tenement known as Mascot Flats. The Carters and the rest of the volunteers slept in the basement of Metro Baptist Church during their week of work. While Rosalynn Carter - who died on Nov. 19 at the age of 96 - told her husband she was going to help with the food and “was not going to do hammering,” the former first lady quickly went back on her vow.

“Jimmy asked me and some other women to pry up some linoleum from the floor,” she told Habitat for Humanity. “Just before we finished, somebody brought some boards for us to nail down. The first day, I was hammering.”

During that first build in New York, the former president recalled to reporters how he had seen an elderly woman cooking food over a trash fire that she built between two bricks, and realized what affordable housing could mean to the neighborhood and others like it.

“I’ve learned more about the needy than I ever did as a governor, as a candidate or as a president,” Carter told The Washington Post in 1992. “The sacrifice I thought I would be making turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life. We have become small players in an exciting global effort to alleviate the curse of homelessness.”

In the years that followed, Habitat for Humanity became synonymous with Carter’s post-presidential life. Through the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project, an annual home-building blitz, the Carters have worked alongside an estimated 104,000 volunteers across multiple continents, according to the nonprofit. Images and videos of the couple working on homes around the world were broadcast on TV and widely shared on social media.

After the Carter Center announced that the former president would receive hospice care, people living in homes Carter helped build started thanking him for his work. In North Texas, Benita Luna said her big kitchen was her favorite part of the home that was constructed for her and her family during a 2014 build by the Carters.

“Going to help all these families out so they can have their own home, that’s just something awesome,” she told WFAA in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Donald Kao, who has lived in New York’s Mascot Flats building since it was renovated, recalled to WNBC how Carter and the residents tirelessly worked to make the tenement a place of pride. The Lower East Side was once an undesirable location, but apartments there now sometimes sell for millions of dollars. When the Carters returned to East Sixth Street in 2013, the city’s Habitat for Humanity chapter said that almost 100 percent of the children in the building graduated from high school and went on to study at a community college or university.

“We were in a way privileged by the influence Jimmy Carter had,” Kao told the TV station in February.

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There is no shortage of stories about Carter, who famously had a no-nonsense work ethic on build sites, Reckford told The Post. The CEO recalled a 1999 project in the Philippines in which Carter and a group of 14,000 volunteers were building 293 houses at six sites in the largest-ever Carter Work Project. Realizing they were falling behind schedule, Carter did what he could to help speed things up.

“He walks into a volunteer’s home and he goes, ‘I see you’re a little behind, do you have your toilet in?’” Reckford recalled. “He goes, ‘If I show you how to do it, then can you go next door and help your son?’ This is Jimmy Carter telling someone how to install a toilet in the sweltering heat. You could see how deeply meaningful it was to him.”

Reckford said Carter regularly pushed for Habitat to capitalize on his name to promote the organization’s message. He’d take photos with volunteers after the project was finished, but the work always came first, Carter told the New York Times in 1984. As he smiled and waved at New Yorkers, who were in awe that a former president was spending his time building housing, Carter stressed the reason he was there - and would be at Habitat sites for decades to come.

“I just hope people let me do my work,” he said.