How We Give Back
Every house we buy in Wisconsin makes something else possible. Here is where a piece of it goes.
Two Days. One House. One Family.
Every year our team travels to Mexico and builds a home for a family living without one. This year we brought a camera. This is the full story, from the night we met the family to the moment they walked through their own front door.
Filmed on location in Baja, Mexico, in partnership with Homes of Hope, a ministry of YWAM San Diego/Baja.
Where It Goes
Homes of Hope
Homes of Hope started in 1990 with a single house in Tijuana and twelve volunteers. The founder, Sean Lambert, brought his three-year-old daughter along. While the team worked, she noticed another family living in an abandoned bus on a nearby hill, with the engine pulled out so they could use the space to cook. She asked her dad whether they were going to build a house for the bus people too.
They built the second house that year. Then twelve more. Then twenty-five the year after that.
Today Homes of Hope has built more than 6,300 homes across 27 nations, with over 3,000 in the Baja region alone. They build for hard-working families who have no realistic path to owning a home, families living under tarps, in abandoned vehicles, on dirt floors. The organization handles materials, logistics, and family selection. The volunteers bring the labor.
That last part is what drew us in. This is not a program you can write a check to and walk away from. You have to show up, and you have to build the thing with your hands.
Why We Keep Going Back
Our Fifth Year
Corey went the first time because someone else paid his way. A gentleman in a real estate networking group invited him and covered the entire trip. He brought his daughter Cailey, who was eight at the time.
Five builds later, the trip has become the thing our team looks forward to most, and the invitation has been passed along many times over. Team members bring their spouses. They bring their kids. Some come back a second and third year and pay their own way to do it.
The reason we keep going is not complicated. It is difficult, physical, unglamorous work with a result you can stand in front of at the end of it. Very little else in adult life works that way.
“We love being able to serve God and do it in a way that is a tangible realization of his love that he gives us every day, and be able to share this with our kids and with our team and with other people in the community, and allow them to have that same experience that somebody allowed me to have five years ago is just a huge blessing.”
– Corey Reyment, Owner
What a Build Looks Like
Two Working Days
The night before, the team meets the family. Through a translator, we ask them about their kids, what they hope for, what they want their children to be able to do that they were not able to do themselves. It is not a formality. It is the reason the next two days mean anything.
Day one is framing and walls. Day two is the roof, the paint, and the finish work, and if we get done early, we take the family shopping. Our team pools its own money for that part. This year it came to fifteen hundred dollars, and it went toward groceries, household basics, toys for the kids, and a pair of soccer gloves for a boy who had mentioned he wanted them.
Then comes the key ceremony. The team stands in a circle and passes the keys hand to hand, and each person says something to the family before the keys reach them. Then the family goes inside their house for the first time.
“A lot of these people have never had a locking door before, which is something we just take for granted back home.”
– Corey Reyment, Owner
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