World Housing is a Vancouver-based non-profit that makes partnerships with developers to ensure that each time they sell an apartment or condominium, they also supply a $3000 prefabricated house to an impoverished family, living in what their website calls “Third World garbage dump communities.” World Housing is collaborating with developers in cities such as Toronto, Taipei, and Oahu, Hawaii. According to the New York Daily News, several New York developers are now considering joining this program.
Other companies have implemented this buy-one-give-one approach for such products as shoes, clothing, solar flashlights and soccer balls. World Housing asks the developer not to pass on the $3000 cost to the home buyer, but to cover it themselves, and then World Housing hires local youth in developing countries such as the Philippines and Cambodia to build the prefabricated houses.
“Ultimately, government isn’t the fix, religion isn’t the fix, business isn’t the fix, nonprofits aren’t the fix,” World Housing co-founder Peter Dupuis told Matt Chaban of New York Daily News. “The only way we can come up with solutions to the world’s problems is by working together, person-to-person, and technology is making that possible.”
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