The City of Bellingham, Washington approved another tiny home village for people leaving homelessness. It’s a cluster of 35 to 40 units opening in early 2027 on city-owned land. The site will be run by HomesNOW! Not Later, a local nonprofit, the Bellingham Herald reported.
The organization operates with no paid staff and depends on volunteers. Many volunteers are residents who help build and manage the villages themselves.
Applicants are screened and must agree to a shared rulebook that includes staying sober and pitching in. HomesNOW reports that about 40 percent of the people who pass through its flagship village reach permanent housing.
The surface story is about a housing program. The pattern underneath reveals a critical successful factor in driving transformation change at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
Ownership Drives Commitment
Safety nets can be controversial. We’ve seen this across city, state, and national social programs. But research shows that a safety net that also asks something of the people receiving it drives commitment to change.
Why would adding an obligation, and sometimes a cost, make the process of helping others work even better?
A place to sleep isn’t enough to turn a life around. HomesNOW says so in its own materials, noting that people who have been on the streets often lose confidence and need to rebuild self-esteem by contributing again. So, residents are asked – and required – to pitch in.
They build the units, run the front gate, and enforce the rules that keep the village functioning.
That labor is doing something psychological. Researchers call it the IKEA effect: people place higher value on what they help create. Effort turns what can be seen as a “handout” into a sense of accomplishment. That’s where self-worth starts to return.
Give a Hand Up, Not a Hand Out
The same principle is true at a much larger scale outside Austin, Texas. Community First! Village, built by the nonprofit Mobile Loaves & Fishes, houses hundreds of formerly homeless residents on a master-planned property that opened in 2015.
Founder Alan Graham calls it “a hand up, not a handout.” Residents pay rent and earn income through on-site micro-enterprises in gardening, art, and hospitality. In a single year, nearly 200 residents earned about $1.2 million through that work.
The point is dignity. A paycheck and an address give people a reason to stay.
The rent matters more than the dollars it collects. Paying to live somewhere turns a recipient into a resident with standing, and standing changes how people behave. And it fosters community at the same time.
People value and protect what they help pay for and build.
Scaling Up to Help People Show Up
Since 2019, the number of tiny home villages across the country has nearly quadrupled. Community First! in Bellingham now trains other organizations to copy the approach, and versions have opened in Midland and Little Rock.
Each new village adapts something already proven by other cities and nonprofit models. The math works too. HomesNOW, for example, runs largely on donations and volunteer labor, and its approach eases the load on police, emergency rooms, and shelters that the status quo keeps funding. Costs fall while outcomes improve.
Having worked across dozens of Fortune 1000 companies and nonprofits, I can confidently say that most organizations reward novelty and mistakenly think they need to create things from scratch. That’s why the “not invented here” problem exists – if you don’t create it yourself, you won’t support it. And that mindset is actually a barrier to progress.
Instead, the teams that solve hard problems fastest borrow best practices from within and outside their markets and industry. They find someone who has cracked a version of their problem and study exactly how. Then they apply it to themselves in a unique way.
People Support What They Help Create
Here’s how any leader can move forward by applying the lessons from homeless villages that work:
- Pair support with contribution. When you design programs for the people you serve, build in a real role for them so the support restores agency and reduces dependence.
- Add small skin in the game. A modest cost or commitment turns a beneficiary into a stakeholder, which lifts both motivation and follow-through.
- Copy what already works. Before building a solution from scratch, find an organization that has solved your problem elsewhere and study its operating model in detail.
Underneath the tiny homes and the rulebooks is a principle that has scale. People invest in what they help build, so include them in the process.
The next solution your organization needs may already be running in a parking lot in the small town of Bellingham.
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