A home is where you spend Christmas, where you sleep through the night without cold air slipping in through broken windows. A home is where homework happens at the kitchen table, where families can cook, rest, feel safe, and dream together.
Without decent housing, everything becomes harder. Health, education, stability, and even relationships suffer. That is why Hope Builds in Romania, unique volunteer house-building events, are so important.
Over the past year, Habitat for Humanity worked alongside volunteers who contributed nearly 42,000 hours’ worth of time, skills and energy to improve housing conditions in communities across Africa. Today, we highlight how volunteering continues to shape individuals, strengthen community connections, and inspire long-term civic engagement.
Volunteering has a unique power to build team spirit, create shared memories, and fill people with a real sense of accomplishment. It pulls us away from screens and routines and places us into something deeply human, working side by side, learning from one another, and becoming a community.
This same power has been visible across Romania over the past three years. From 2023 to 2025, Habitat for Humanity Romania organized six Hope Builds, bringing people together from Romania and beyond. These volunteer construction events unite teams, strangers, colleagues, and friends to build homes for families facing difficult socioeconomic and family situations.
At Habitat for Humanity, volunteering takes on many shapes. Not every volunteer may swing a hammer, but every volunteer helps move us closer to a world where everyone has a decent place to live.
In just the first half of 2025, more than 3,300 people volunteered with Habitat for Humanity across Europe and the Middle East. Some helped build homes in Romania, Kenya, and Malawi. Others organized charity dinners in Poland, sorted donated goods in Irish ReStores, ran upcycling workshops in Great Britain, or supported communications and events in Jordan and Egypt. No two roles are alike. There is something for everyone who is willing to help.
Across Africa and the Global South, climate change is transforming the way communities move, settle, and survive. Droughts, floods, and environmental degradation are pushing families from rural areas into cities at unprecedented rates — and urban informal settlements are absorbing the shock.
In November, Habitat for Humanity contributed to critical conversations shaping the future of climate migration, urban resilience, and community-driven adaptation.
Habitat for Humanity is committed to gender equality and sees it as fundamental for dignity, safety and a modern, inclusive society. Because gender roles are still shaped by social, historical, political and economic inequalities, we pay specific attention to keeping gender equality at the core of our work.
At this year’s 38th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, leaders rallied around a bold and timely theme: “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations.” While reparations are often viewed through a financial lens, the summit emphasized the need for deeper structural change - addressing inequalities that continue to hold communities back.
One of those inequalities? Housing.
Cities across the Global South are on the frontline of climate impacts, yet the needs and voices of communities in informal settlements are often overlooked in climate research, policy responses, and financing. This gap was a central theme at the recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on Climate Change and Cities (SRCities) workshop, held on the sidelines of the Africa Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN).
In cities across the Global South, people are increasingly pushed to the margins by insecure land tenure, climate displacement, and exclusion from urban planning. At the 2025 LANDac International Conference, Habitat for Humanity joined global changemakers