🔒Habitat for Humanity’s Moody seeks to revitalize Hartford neighborhoods

When Karraine Moody talks about the first time she volunteered at a Hartford Area Habitat for Humanity site, it’s with a palpable sincerity.

She was a freshman at Trinity College and signed up with Habitat’s Trinity chapter to work at one of the nonprofit’s build sites. Volunteering was nothing new to Moody, whose parents instilled in her a strong sense of civic duty via community service. But something about Habitat’s mission really spoke to her.

“Going to that house that Saturday morning, we were painting, and we were working really hard, but I felt like it was such a great mission,” Moody said. “I said, ‘Wow, this is great, [someone is] going to purchase this home, and their family’s going to be situated.’ This is an opportunity for someone to really take that next step.”

More than 20 years later, and after a detour in corporate human resources, Moody is chief executive of the nonprofit, a position she’s held since 2014. Under her stewardship, Habitat Hartford has moved increasingly in the direction of rehabbing blighted properties, rather than just new construction, she said. And in coming years, she wants the organization to be seen not only as a home-placement agency, but also as a financial independence driver and a potent partner in neighborhood redevelopment.

After college, Moody worked in HR for United Technologies Corp. Dealing with people in that capacity aligned with her empathetic nature; it was also where she got her first taste of management.

Her first assignment was to organize a take-your-child-to-work day for employees at all of UTC’s divisions.

“[My boss] said, ‘There’s your budget, you work it out, each division is different, … but we need one cohesive full event for a full day,’” Moody recalled. “It was a beautiful event, everybody raved about it, it was just like my whole creative juices were used, and from there it was like, ‘what else can I do?’ ”

Redevelopment force

Moody left corporate America in 2005 to join Habitat Hartford as director of family services.

The nonprofit’s approximately $5.5 million annual budget is spent placing families earning between $36,000 and $55,000 in houses they pay for through an interest-free mortgage.

Hartford Habitat vets about 100 applicants each year to assess their ability to pay a mortgage (i.e. income and rental and credit history) and need. Beneficiaries are also required to provide 150 hours of “sweat equity” by working on Habitat sites, or other community service.

Most who apply don’t qualify for a loan, Moody said, a fact that bothered her when she took over as CEO of the 20-employee operation.

“We used to be able to say, ‘OK, you don’t qualify, but you can go here to get some help,’ but due to funding and changes in the nonprofit world, a lot of those organizations and resources closed,” Moody said.

That’s why she started the Financial Freedom Center in 2017. This Habitat initiative offers free financial guidance to people trying to qualify for a Habitat home, but whose debt, credit history or other factors bar them from receiving a mortgage, Moody said. While the goal is to qualify them for a home, those who don’t reach that goal can still greatly improve their financial standing.

Moody has also come to see the organization as a force for improving Hartford’s neighborhoods. She has made it a point to include at least a few rehabs in the 10 to 15 projects Habitat Hartford starts each year.

In early 2019, for example, Moody said families moved into two rehabbed houses in Hartford’s North End. Hartford Habitat also renovated houses in the city’s Asylum Hill neighborhood, which helped turnaround a South Marshall Street block.

The nonprofit’s vetting process allows it to make sure people moving into the newly renovated homes are invested in maintaining their value and a thriving neighborhood, Moody said.

Over the next few years, a lot of Habitat Hartford’s efforts will go toward acquiring and rehabbing homes in North Hartford, an area Moody said is ripe for neighborhood redevelopment. As she plans ahead, she still genuinely takes to heart the motto she heard that first day she painted a house on a job site as a college student.

“Habitat is a hand-up, and not a hand-out,” she said.