Millard Fuller Interview (page: 7 / 9) Founder, Habitat for Humanity International	Print Interview

What did your kids think when you gave up all your posessions and embarked on this quest?

Millard Fuller: They were real small.

Linda Fuller: Yeah. They were five and three. So the only thing they knew was they were glad Daddy was home and that we were together and doing things together. We took our first family vacation after we made that decision.

Millard Fuller: The first thing we did was get in the car and go to Florida and spend two weeks just going around.

Linda Fuller: They were having a ball.

Millard Fuller: The kids had never had so much fun in their lives.

Did you ever wonder if you'd made the right decision? Did you ever miss the speedboats and the Lincoln Continental?

Linda Fuller: I'm asked that quite often. "How in the world could you give all that up?" It was just such a relief. I've never regretted it, getting rid of all that stuff, and it freed us up to really have an enriching kind of life.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Millard Fuller: Prior to leaving business, our lives had gone in separate ways, and we really became strangers to each other. After we left business and decided that we would seek a common path, and let that path be God's path for our lives, we worked together, and we've always worked together from that point until this day. And the children were involved in it. We were together. We did things together, and it was exciting. And even though, instead of driving a Lincoln Continental she was riding a motor bike, she was riding a motor bike as a happy woman, not a frustrated woman. She was a fulfilled woman, and she had her child on the back of the motor bike, and they were having an adventure. For a kid, it's more fun to be on the back of a motor bike than it is in the back seat of a Lincoln. And we were taking trips down to the Zaire River in a river boat, and we would go out and get sand out of -- I mean, it was -- in fact, one of our kids said to us recently -- she said, "Daddy, how could we ever thank you for how you raised us?" It was a thrilling moment, because our kids had a storybook childhood. We went to see the gorillas together in the forest. We floated down the Zaire River. We went and had picnics at the Botanical Garden. We dug out ant hills, and made blocks, and painted houses, and the kids had an adventure. We all had an adventure. We climbed a volcanic mountain together and camped out on the rim of the volcano. It was a marvelous experience that we had as a couple, and that we had together with our kids.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

When you came back to the United States, and this was now a full-fledged operation, did you still run up against conventional business resistance?

Millard Fuller: Always, there are problems when you are forging ahead. I've thought many times, a person's basic character never changes in life. I am by nature a hard-driving, pushing, achievement-oriented kind of person. What happens is that your goals change. I changed my goal from wanting to be a multi-millionaire to wanting to be the best father I could be, and have the most loving family that we could have, and to create a ministry that would put everybody in the world in a decent place to live. And Linda can tell you, I work as hard now as I ever did in business, if not more so, but she's involved in it, and we do it very much together. And it's not like I've become a laid-back, totally different kind of person. It's just that my goals are so different now.

And you get to work with Jimmy Carter.

MIllard Fuller: He gets to work with us.  

He gets to work with you. I understand your first attempt to involve President Carter with Habitat was not successful. Can you tell us about that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Millard Fuller: I had a friend who was working for the old Washington Star newspaper, and I called him up one day and asked him about what he was doing and so forth. He's a man that had been with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And he had gotten a new job with The New York Times, and so he said to me right over the phone, "I've been wanting to talk with you, because I want to do something about Habitat for Humanity, but I need an angle." I said, "Well, I've got an angle for you." I said, "I've been trying to get Jimmy Carter involved, and I have not been successful." That was at that particular point, I had not been successful. So what I did was write President Reagan a letter and asked him to come build houses in Plains, and maybe that would get Jimmy Carter involved. And he put that in The New York Times, and that irritated Jimmy Carter big time. And he didn't communicate directly to me, but he began to tell other people that he didn't appreciate me making such a comment.

Did you ever regret that?

Millard Fuller: No, not regret, because I wanted to get everybody that I could get involved. And sometimes you have to do something to get their attention, even if it's in a negative way. But President Carter is a wonderful man, and he doesn't hold that against me in the slightest degree, to my knowledge. He never has indicated it.

President Carter did eventually become very inolved with Habitat. How did that finally come about? He lives near Americus, was that just serendipity?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Millard Fuller: It was not serendipity. He actually lives in Plains, which is about nine miles from Americus. It's the same county. It's the same locale. But when he came back from the White House, for years he has taught Sunday school, and he was teaching Sunday school at his Little Maranatha Baptist Church. And he began to say things to people in the Sunday school class, that he was interested in what we were doing in Habitat for Humanity. It was a very small program at that time, and I began to hear these things. So we had a meeting in Americus, Georgia, of our board of directors, and we invited him to come and speak to our board. He agreed to come, and he came and he said nice things. I really didn't know President Carter except by reputation, and Linda and I didn't know either one of them, but he did some other things. Then in 1983, Linda and I led a big walk. We've done several marathon walks, and '83, we did our first one from Americus, Georgia to Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a 700-mile walk. And just without any personal invitation, but just by general announcements, Rosalynn Carter came that morning and we started to walk with Amy, and walked with us to the edge of town. And we walked side by side with her. She was saying nice things about what we were doing, and very affirming and supportive. And then at Christmas of that year, they made a modest contribution. If my memory serves me correctly, it was like $500. I told Linda one day, I said, "You know, President Carter, in several ways, he's expressed interest in what we're doing. I think I'm going to try to go talk to him."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So I got an appointment and went out to his house in Plains, and I just sat down in his office. And this story incidentally is in one of my books entitled No More Shacks. But I said, "President Carter, I'm out here as a neighbor," and I said, "You and Mrs. Carter have expressed interest in Habitat for Humanity in various ways, but I'm out here to ask you a simple question. Are you interested in Habitat for Humanity, or are you very interested?" Well, he was amused at how I posed the question. He said -- he looked at Rosalynn and he said, "Well, I guess we're very interested." I said, "Well, what do we do with that?" He said, "I'll tell you what, you go back to your office and write me a letter, and in that letter suggest ways in which you think we can be helpful," and he said, "And don't be bashful." So I went back and I called up everybody I thought -- Linda and I talked it over -- and I called up everybody I thought who had had any wisdom. I said, "A former President has asked for a list. What should I put in it?" I took two weeks to write the letter, and I eventually sent him back a letter and asked him for 15 things, things like join our board of directors, help us write letters to do fund-raising, come out and build on the building site, and so forth. I mailed it to him. Within two days, I got a phone call. "Millard, I want you to come back. I want to talk to you about your letter." So I went to his house. He had the letter on his coffee table. He said, "You wrote a good letter." Well, I was hoping he'd agree to do two or three things. He went over the list and agreed to do all 15, and from that point forward, he's been with us now 15 years. That was 15 years ago, and one of the things he agreed to do was -- every year -- a building blitz, where he would go somewhere and build houses for a week, and he's been faithful every year for 15 years. They've gone out and built in a different place, a bunch of Habitat houses.

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