2016 Annual Letter

Learn what happened in New Story’s second year of operations. The impact, strategy, and the key areas to improve.

Addressed to New Story’s Builders, Advisors and close friends of the organization. Written by Brett Hagler, CEO, on Dec 27, 2016.

We believe safe homes unlock potential.

New Story family,

2016 was a dream come true to see our passion and hard work turn into a reality. It was our second year of operations, after coming off a great first year hyped by going 0–200 homes, press and Y Combinator. Heading into 2016 — we were no longer a little startup — we needed to build a company, sustain the growth and deliver on serious promises.

We work in countries where large nonprofits struggle, could we build hundreds of homes? Would corporate partners trust a young nonprofit? Impact Data is hard, the established nonprofits don’t even do it, could we start a program? We didn’t have answers, but I knew we’d be relentlessly determined to figure it out. And that’s what we did.

515 New Homes

• Most importantly, ~2,525 life trajectories will be changed through these 515 homes

Growth — Operations, Homes Built, Communities

• $2M committed to cover New Story’s operations for the next two years from “The Builders”
• We built 245 homes in 2016
• We spent ~$600,000* and generated $3.2M* for homes (100% goes to building homes)
• 7 Communities (Haiti: Leveque, Minotrie, Bercy, Gonaïves) (El Salvador: Nuevo Cuscatlán, Ahuachapan) (Bolivia: Mizque)

*still waiting on EOY accounting and financials, this is not an exact amount.

Strategy For Community Improvement

Launched two new long-term initiatives from concept to implementation:

A. Impact Data — quantifying and understanding the impact of home on health, education, income and community building to learn and improve our model:

Emma working with our local partner in Haiti and a home recipient to collect baseline data, before a family moves into a home. See more at newstorycharity.org/impact

B. New Story 2.0 Community Design — using a “participatory design” process to amplify voices of families in community design:

Participatory Design is a process that involves the families and people that will be living in the community in the actual design and planning of the community. We teamed up with an urban design firm from Berkeley to implement this process and finalize the plans. In November, the Government of Ahuachapan El Salvador approved the design that the community, guided by New Story’s process, created.

Team and Culture

Recruited an A+ core team that is New Story’s greatest strength:

L -> R (Matthew (Product), Allie (COO), Emma (Impact Data), Morgan (CTO), Geraldine (Dev) , Sarah (Donor Experience), Brett (CEO), Mike (C0-Founder) not pictured)

Other Key Achievements that set up New Story for future success:

• Built 245 homes. All homes in Haiti withstood a Cat 4 Hurricane
• Proved corporate partnerships work as companies made $100k+ donations or commitments (BHGRE, Sotheby’s, Intellinet, DocuSign, Salesforce, Gilead Sciences, Baltimore Ravens, and more partners listed below)

• Started to prevent scaling issues by building internal and partnership software for the future. We built a custom CRM, Ops Management dashboard, and an Asana-like task tool that both New Story and our partners will use to scale

Morgan, Matthew and Geraldine built the technical foundation that we’ll integrate with software we’re building for our on-ground partners.

Areas of Operational Focus in 2017:

• Improving accuracy and predictability of building time for communities
• Continue to increase the number and quality of move-in videos sent
• Strengthen our internal systems to enable us to improve efficiency as we scale

Q1 2017 will focus on these opportunities for improvements.

Year three will still be an aggressive growth year (~65%) for home funding, but most importantly, it’s the year to position us for exponential scale in the following years to come. The theme is to get “Better Before Bigger.”

2017 Goals

Jennifer’s Story:

Together, we changed thousands of lives this year, but I’d like to close with the story of one little beautiful girl, Jennifer. We’re on a mission to change parts of the world, but it’s incredibly important to know that happens by changing one person’s world at a time.

Please meet the Cecilia Lopez Family. Their little 2 year old daughter, Jennifer (in the pink shirt below), had serious heart surgery right before moving into her new home.

“She had two holes in her little heart.

She had to get heart surgery. She is now recovering and thank God she is going to be in a nice place.

We will not be on a mud floor with insects carrying chikungunya, sewage stench and contaminated water. When she recovers, we we will be in a strong home.”

Providing safe homes and communities is what we do, but Jennifer’s story is why we do it.

Watch Jennifer’s family story:

3min video of Jennifer’s family explaining life before and after a safe home

Thank you for building this organization with us and unlocking potential for thousands of deserving people.

Please reach out with any questions or feedback — we’d love to hear from you.

Onwards and upwards,

Brett and the team

Safe homes in thriving communities unlock potential.

Do for one what you wish you could do for all.