A Sumter County farm, a housing fund and a move to Americus.

Habitat for Humanity grew out of Koinonia Farm, a Christian community in rural Sumter County, Georgia. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, in an entry originally published in 2005 and last edited in 2022, says two white Baptist ministers and their wives, Martin and Mabel England and Clarence and Florence Jordan, established the farm in 1942 to live out principles of pacifism, simplicity and racial integration. Its name came from the Greek word for fellowship, and members pooled their resources into a common treasury.

The founders of Habitat arrived later. The encyclopedia’s entry on Millard Fuller, originally published in 2005 and last edited in 2018, says Millard and Linda Fuller, who had married in 1959, decided in the mid-1960s to simplify their lives and focus on their faith, and in 1965 visited Koinonia, where Millard met Jordan. In March 1968 Fuller returned to the farm, and Jordan suggested a Fund for Humanity, a nonprofit fund to build modest homes through a partnership between people who could not afford a house and volunteers. Homeowners would receive no-interest loans and make affordable mortgage payments back into the fund. English Wikipedia dates the fund to 1968 as well, and the encyclopedia’s Koinonia entry says that in 1969 Jordan and Fuller reincorporated the farm as Koinonia Partners and began an interest-free building programme in Sumter County.

From 1973 to 1976 the Fullers and their children lived in Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, testing the fund concept there; Wikipedia places the work at a Disciples of Christ mission in Mbandaka. In 1976, both encyclopedia entries say, the Fullers left Koinonia to establish Habitat for Humanity in nearby Americus. Wikipedia says the organisation, Habitat for Humanity International, is headquartered there, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia records that its administrative headquarters later moved to Atlanta.

A former president on a building site.

Habitat’s volunteers have included a former president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, and his wife. The Philadelphia station 6abc reported on 29 December 2024, the day of Carter’s death, that his work with Habitat began in 1984 in Manhattan’s East Village, where the former president volunteered to help restore a six-storey brick building on East 6th Street, Habitat’s opening project in New York City. Carter told the station he had arrived to find a building “filled with debris” and travelled up with volunteers from Georgia on a Trailways bus; Rob DeRocker, the project’s executive director, said the press had expected a few ceremonial hammer swings and that Carter instead worked full days on the site. The station reported that Carter spent ten days working on the apartment, with Secret Service agents stationed outside.

That trip became an annual event. The New Georgia Encyclopedia describes Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter as heading the Jimmy Carter Work Project, an annual “blitz” build, and Wikipedia records the renamed Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Work Project reaching its 40th edition in Atlanta in May 2026.

Fuller also wrote about the work: the encyclopedia lists books including Bokotola (1977), Love in the Mortar Joints (1980), No More Shacks! (1986) and The Theology of the Hammer (1994), titles that put the ministry’s building language on the cover, and he and Linda co-wrote The Excitement Is Building (1990).

The founders’ own story ends with a parting. The encyclopedia says Fuller was dismissed as president in January 2005 after unresolved disputes with the board, including his unhappiness over the move of Habitat’s administrative headquarters to Atlanta, and that later that year the Fullers founded the Fuller Center for Housing, also a Christian housing ministry. Fuller died on 3 February 2009 and was buried at Koinonia, the encyclopedia records.

Design and documentation.

Charity identities live in public in a way few commercial marks do. An emblem has to read at the size of a lapel pin and at the size of a banner across a street, and it often has to survive being redrawn by volunteers with whatever paint, felt or tape is to hand. That is why so many charity marks rely on one strong shape and one strong colour: a simple silhouette holds up when it is stencilled onto a collection tin, printed on a sticker or stitched onto a cap.

Collection boxes and tins are small pieces of packaging design. They carry the mark, a short line of copy and a slot, and they are seen for a second or two as someone walks past. Volunteer uniforms do similar work at human scale: a coloured vest, a lanyard or a printed T-shirt tells a passer-by who to approach at an event or a shop counter.

Campaign posters are where charity identities stretch. Photography, hand lettering and bold headlines change from season to season, while the emblem, the name and the core colour stay fixed in a corner. Reading a charity brand well means noticing which elements move and which never do.

Sweat equity, a shop for materials and a name on the fence.

Habitat’s building model is spelled out in the sources. Wikipedia says its homes are built with volunteer labour, including that of the future homeowners themselves through sweat equity, alongside paid contractors for some construction and infrastructure work, and that the organisation makes no profit from the sales. The New Georgia Encyclopedia describes Habitat as a Christian ministry that seeks to provide decent housing to people unable to afford it through traditional channels — the same partnership idea Jordan and Fuller set down at Koinonia in 1968.

The retail arm carries the name onto the high street. Wikipedia describes Habitat ReStores as retail outlets that sell new and used building and household materials donated by small businesses, large companies, job sites, contractors and individuals. Where Goodwill and Salvation Army shops are known for donated clothing and household goods, a ReStore deals in building materials. Wikipedia also lists local programmes under the Habitat name, such as A Brush With Kindness, in which volunteer groups help low-income homeowners maintain the exteriors of their homes.

The organisation has also tried new building methods under the same name: Wikipedia records that in 2022, in Tempe, Arizona, Habitat for Humanity used 3D-printed walls for a house when not enough labour was available.

For a design guide, Habitat for Humanity shows an identity carried by an activity — a house going up, with volunteers and the family who will live there on the same site — and by a founding story that runs from a Sumter County farm to a former president on an East Village building site. Compare it with Goodwill, whose thrift stores also turn donated goods into a retail brand, and The Salvation Army, another faith-based charity known by its volunteers in the street. For this guide we use roof blue, field green and pine timber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Habitat for Humanity’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.