The Merrimack Valley Housing Partnership (MVHP) was founded in 1986 as a non-profit dedicated to developing housing for low and moderate income earners. Since then they have pivoted their non-profit mission away from development and into the field of home ownership education. Since 1991 they have educated more than 16,000 families on home ownership through home buyer training seminars conducted in several languages, including English, Spanish, and Khmer. In addition to housing classes, they also offer credit counseling classes, landlord training seminars, and administrative and technical support for down payment assistance programs.
Behind the success of this organization stands a man who has built the organization from the ground up for more than 23 years. When he stepped into the role as Executive Director, the organization had $7K in the bank, and the Board of Directors at that time told him that he could have the job if he could just raise the money to pay his salary. Now celebrating its 30 year, MVHP today has its own endowment, zero liabilities, and over $1M in assets.
According to USA Today, the number of non-profit charities increases by 50% every 10-12 years, with more than 1 million charities to choose from in the United States. With such tight competition when it comes to fundraising, and what seems to be a limited pool of grants and fundraising dollars to go around, how has this little old non-profit from Lowell, Massachusetts thrived? I recently sat down with the visionary behind it all, Jim Wilde, to find out. Here are Jim Wilde’s 3 strategies to creating hope, happiness, and homeownership in a competitive world where everyone is competing for the same limited resources:
Tell Your Story: Jim says that an enormous part of the success of the organization has come from their ability to tell their story. He says that even today, a large segment of their time is dedicated to storytelling. One way they do this is through sharing the individual stories of families who have gone through the program and have ended up buying a home thanks to MVHP. He says that they regularly send their MVHP newsletter out by mail and email and the newsletter is packed with family success stories. Wilde says that it’s important for regular donors to know that their money is being put to really good use. In addition to the individual success stories, Wilde says that over the past few years they’ve been strategic in compiling data to show the overall success of the program. For example, a team from UMass Lowell, recently sifted through sixteen years of data, and they can now prove that at least 1 out of every 14 homes in Lowell was sold to a family who utilized the MVHP program. He says that he’s immensely proud of the fact that it’s impossible to find a street anywhere in Lowell that has not been impacted by MVHP. Furthermore, the data they have compiled proves that the default rate on MVHP homes is one quarter of the average industry default rates, suggesting that their program is a success when it comes to teaching people how to establish household budgets and how to make responsible buying decisions. Wilde says that if you want your business to be heard and noticed in a very competitive world, get really good at telling your story.
Finding Satisfaction: Prior to finding his way to MVHP 23 years ago, Jim was building a career in the high-tech world. It was high stress and long hours. He says that he didn’t mind hard work, but that particular work didn’t feed his soul. Then he found the Merrimack Valley Housing Partnership. He says that in many ways, the job was more stressful and the work hours were even longer than before, but there has never been a day in which he has dreaded going to work. He says that to build a business in a very competitive world, you must derive tremendous satisfaction from the work you are doing. He says that it is not the paycheck that will motivate you to build something awesome, it is the satisfaction you garner from the undertaking. Shortly after taking the job at MVHP, Wilde moved away from Boston and moved into the city of Lowell, because he wanted to be a part of the landscape he’s helping to shape. He lives close to the office and he spends most of his time further building MVHP, networking with local businesses, and interacting with the people of the community, many of whom he knows well because they passed through the doors of MVHP on the way to their dreams of home ownership.
Borrow Good Ideas: When Jim Wilde came into the picture 23 years ago, there were not many home ownership counseling agencies on the map. Today there are more than 50 in Massachusetts alone, yet more than 25% of the Massachusetts home ownership counseling graduates have come out of MVHP. Wilde sits on the board of the Massachusetts Homeownership Collaborative, an organization that oversees home ownership education and counseling agencies in Massachusetts. Wilde says that what he loves most about the organization is that it brings together all 50 housing education agencies regularly, giving them an opportunity to borrow good ideas from one another. Wilde says that he, his staff, and the board of directors are responsible for always seeking out great ideas that can support and promote MVHP, and Jim’s job is to execute on those borrowed ideas. He says that when it comes to building any kind of great business, the best thing to do is to find others in the same field doing similar work so that you can collaborate and share best practices. When building a business, Wilde says it can feel lonely sometimes, but if you look hard enough you’ll find others who are working on a similar goal, and by leaning into them for guidance and support, you both become much stronger.
As for the future of home ownership counseling and MVHP, Wilde says he gets great fulfillment from the fact that many of today’s home ownership counseling students are second generation MVHP families. They see the benefits of the program because they are a byproduct of it. He says that he would like to see housing counseling become the minimum standard for all first time buyer mortgage products in the future, a trend that many banks and government agencies seem to be promoting as well. MVHP has been helping families now for more than 30 years, and Jim Wilde has been their greatest advocate for more than 23 of those years. He says he couldn’t be happier in his career or life, feeling blessed that he has somehow manifested his own hope, happiness, and homeownership, by providing the same trifecta of contentment to more than 16,000 others in his local community.