Making a House a Home

Getting the keys is where most stories about homelessness end. Make It Home’s story begins there. The end of a long wait for a roof over a person’s head does not bring with it the promise of a bed, a sofa, or even a pillow, just a roof. The Novato furniture bank turns donations of gently used furniture and household goods into the comfort and dignity of home, without any cost to the recipient. Roughly 210 social service agencies make the referrals, among them youth aging out of foster care, families leaving homelessness, survivors of domestic violence, veterans, and households displaced by fire and flood. Approximately 650 homes a year, across the whole Bay Area.

An empty apartment is not a home, and the difference is not cosmetic. “Yes, an empty house is shelter. Yes, it’s safe. It’s lockable,” says Founder and CEO Carolyn Flannery, “but if people don’t have a table to eat at, or a sofa to sit on, or a bed to sleep in, they’re still at a deficit.” Make It Home supplies the material foundation for self-sufficiency and it impacts whether people stay housed. “If you don’t have any furniture, the recidivism rate from home to homeless in the first year is about 20 percent,” Flannery says. “If you do have furniture, that rate goes to five.”

Youth aging out of foster care were Flannery’s original inspiration. A young person given a place to live typically arrives with nothing: no bed, no dresser, nowhere to welcome visitors. It is a fragile place from which to hold a job, stay in school, or manage one’s health. Make It Home provides the essentials that also free scarce income for rent, food, and transportation. The organization now serves populations far beyond foster youth, but the insight remains consistent: furniture transforms a housing placement into a stable base for independence.

So how does Make It Home furnish 650 homes a year? By recognizing the abundance already sitting in Bay Area homes. Furniture is among the least recycled things people own, bulky, hard to resell, and usually headed for a landfill once a room is redecorated. Make It Home intercepts it. Volunteers in the woodshop and the upholstery workshop repair items, so every household furnished keeps usable items out of the waste stream. The cost comes to about $1,900 a home, a fraction of retail.

As Flannery explains, “Furniture poverty is a logistics problem, not a scarcity problem.” The Bay Area has the furniture and Make It Home solves the logistics piece. It operates an 11,000-square-foot warehouse with 13 full-time staff and over 200 volunteers. As the organization expands its reach, so does its need for more drivers and delivery capacity. Flannery believes that “every community needs access to a furniture bank—a furnished home is where a family’s future begins.”