As a public school employee for 37 years, Donyelle understands the importance of education. She has worked tirelessly to instill a desire for learning in each of her five children, but working a full-time job while being a widowed mother left little time for Donyelle to pursue her own higher education. To support her two girls and three boys, she dropped out of community college.

Finding a decent, affordable place to call home was an ongoing challenge. Donyelle and her children were priced out of a townhome when the rent started increasing every three months. In search of affordable housing, the family moved across town, but their two-bedroom rental was small and had mice. “We were really in need of better housing,” Donyelle says.

Pushing off going back to school, Donyelle feared that she’d fail to leave anything behind for her children.

Partnering with Habitat for greater opportunity

A friend introduced Donyelle to Habitat for Humanity, and she was soon building her house alongside her future neighbors. She relished the time building her dream home — and building lasting friendships that would root her in her new neighborhood.

Donyelle and her three boys — her two oldest daughters had already left home — moved into their Habitat house in June 2009. She said she felt “pure bliss” walking through her door for the first time.

More than 20 years ago, Peggy and her children moved into the home of her dreams. The mother of three remembers teaching her kids to ride their bikes on the sidewalk in front of the house, sending them to the elementary school “right up the hill” and walking them to the park to play. “Every nook and cranny. Every flaw that somebody might point out, I can look at, and it’s a special memory,” says Peggy, a disabled U.S. Air Force veteran. “It became my home in such a personal, special way.”

Now that her children — 26-year-old U.S. Air Force pilot Connor, 24-year-old Jordan and 20-year-old Jonathon — are adults, Peggy had hoped to maintain a healthy home they could always return to. But as the years passed, her house began to require expensive repairs – like fixing a deteriorating roof – that Peggy couldn’t afford to make. A string of personal losses and the post-traumatic stress disorder she’d developed from her military service made it even more challenging for her to fix her home.

In 2017, a tornado struck Peggy’s neighborhood, accelerating the problems with her roof, and eventually water began saturating her walls and coming into her home. “I went through my dining room, my great room, the hallway and the back bedrooms, and there were water spots everywhere from water coming into the house through the roof,” Peggy says.

Peggy also needed to have her chimney repaired and her windows replaced. During Nebraska’s cold winters, she and her daughter, Jordan, would wrap up in blankets, gloves and scarves while sitting in front of the fireplace to stay warm because their home couldn’t hold heat. The mother and daughter both have a condition that causes blood flow to slow with even minor exposure to cold temperatures. “We’re very sensitive to the cold, and it causes us to be in so much physical pain,” Peggy says.

Generations of service

As the daughter of a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and a veteran herself, Peggy was always more comfortable giving help than receiving it and was reluctant to apply for the home repair program at Habitat for Humanity of Omaha. “She was pretty adamant that there were other veterans who were in worse shape than she was, and that I should be helping them,” says Mark Coffin, Habitat Omaha’s veteran outreach coordinator.