We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Craig Taylor a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Craig thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
My organization is Solutions for Veterans. We specifically develop housing on Department of Veterans Affairs hospital and medical center campuses for homeless, disabled, near homeless and low income senior Veterans. This is usually done by renovating and adaptively reusing vacant buildings on these VA campuses. The result is cumulative. The VA no longer has to spend funds to maintain unusable buildings. The physical environment of the campus is improved. Veterans are removed from the ranks of the homeless and provided high quality permanent housing within their means to pay. The proximity to the VA medical center itself ensures access to quality healthcare and rehabilitative services. The opportunity to live with other Veterans provides a support network of people who share a common history and experience, very critical in the healing process for dealing with the hidden wounds of war.
While this housing is not for every Veteran, it has been uniquely successful in providing housing for many of the hardest to house and serve Veterans, proving to be a valuable model in the panoply of services and programs available to Vets.
I am a Veteran myself, serving in the U. S. Air Force at the end of the Vietnam conflict. I did not serve in Vietnam, but did experience the vituperative spirit of those times toward anyone who put on a military uniform. I cannot fully imagine what it must have been for Vets who answered their country’s call to serve, experienced the hell of war and then came back to their country only to be spit upon, cursed and spurned. For the most part, the Veterans we serve are products of that era or immediately thereafter, before the understanding of PTSD and other debilitating aspects of military service were recognized. Without sharing anywhere near the full experience of what that must be like, knowing those who have has crystalized a sense of empathy with them and stirred a sense of gratitude on the one hand and moral rage on the other at the injustice and indignity of it all, given that what they did, rather adjudged right or wrong in the grand analysis, was to offer their lives in service to the country and the freedoms and values it purports to embody.
The fact that the politicians and power brokers did not make those sacrifices and in many ways benefited from the sacrifices of the Veterans makes it even more poignant. In so many cases they have been forgotten or ignored, to the extent that at one point over 80,000 of them were homeless, others committing suicide at more than 22/day and many just suffering in silence and all too often in mis-placed shame at not being able to live up to their unrealistic standards of what it means to have worn the uniform of the United States of America.
For me, one who did put on that uniform but for reasons of chance or some other unknown force did not have to make those sacrifices, I felt and still feel an overwhelming sense of thankfulness, awe and responsibility towards those who did. I personally have mostly negative feelings about the recent wars that our country has engaged in, but THE LAST people I would hold accountable for the wrong-headed decisions made would be the women and men in the ranks of the military. They are my heroes.
So, what does one do? Given my background, I decided that the best place to pour out my own limited gifts and graces would be to provide access to housing to those whose struggles post service resulted in homelessness. That is the ultimate genesis of Solutions for Veterans. It is my singular, personal way to say: “Thank you for your service.”
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
As a professional, I would describe myself as a non-profit special needs housing developer. My educational background is in Zoology/Biology, Counseling and Theology, but from my earliest post educational activities, starting with the co-founding of the Atlanta affiliate of Habitat for Humanity, my primary work has been to develop affordable housing for low income, special needs populations. This has been influenced by my service in the U. S. Air Force after my graduation from college, and my work in urban missions after completing seminary.
My doctoral work focused on housing and what I saw as the inability of the private sector or the public sector to effectively address the provision of special needs housing within the context of broader community development needs and the fostering of individual growth and advancement. As such, the non-profit option presented itself to me as a third way to achieve quality housing development, especially if it was done with the passion and commitment that a small business entrepreneur brought to his or her efforts, along with the social commitments and focus that public sector programs should embody.
Upon reviewing the status of the extant non-profit housing groups in the 1980’s (there were very few) it also was the case that while the rhetoric was there, the actual production of housing was lacking. A lot of energy and money was spent on conferences, trainings, seminars, workshops, trips here and there (all of which is still true), but very little housing was being generated. The answer seemed obvious. Create non-profits whose very existence (similar to small businesses) was totally dependent on producing a product or service–in my case, housing. All funding would be allocated to the generation of housing and only if housing was created would there be a “payment” to the organization for that work, which it would then use to further the goals of the organization. I coined this model as the entrepreneurial non-profit approach and it has colored my involvement in the housing non-profit sector ever since.
Another aspect of this was the possibility, or more accurately, the probability that some efforts would fail, as with the start-up of many businesses. Under-capitalized in the first place, and stepping into areas that had been ignored or actively avoided by both public and private sectors meant that a lot of work had to be done without a blueprint. That is no longer the case in many areas of affordable housing today (though there are still gaps), but in the 1980’s and 1990’s the book was still being written.
There were failures, but it is also the case that in housing development, the failure of the organization is not really the failure of the mission if the goal has been production. The affordable housing is still there. For me, in Atlanta neighborhoods like Cabbagetown, South Atlanta, Vine City, Peoplestown among many others, I can drive through those communities today and still see the fruits of those housing labors, though the fledgling non-profit organizations we started have long since been dissolved. And in the process, valuable lessons were learned that have made the current non-profit development world a lot more successful.
For me, a critical turning point was in 1995 when we opened a permanent supportive housing community near Grady Hospital for formerly homeless individuals diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. One of our first residents was a Vietnam veteran who had contracted the virus through his use of an infected needle as he fed his heroin addiction. He was a highly decorated Veteran, but because of his diagnosis he was a pariah to his family, his church and his country. This shook him deeply yet he was making a heroic effort to “beat this disease.” He became my maintenance supervisor for the community and in the process, a good friend. That was all cut short when he committed suicide a few months later, supposedly after he tried to reconnect with his family and failed.
I made a promise in his memory and to myself that if I could, someday I would try to make a difference in the lives of others who were a lot like him. When in 2009 the opportunity came to do housing for homeless and disabled Veterans through a unique program enabled by the Veterans Administration, I leaped at the chance. This was coming at a very low point in my professional career where my lack of “business sense” had caught up with my missional passion to do what was needed regardless of “real world limitations.” There is definitely a place for prudence and “bottom line” thinking, even in the non-profit world.
Yet, it was not lost on me that but for this low point in my life I might never have even seen this opportunity to make good on a promise I had made 15 years earlier, and frankly had allowed to languish.
While the details are too vast to go into, it was in the ensuing few years that the framework for Solutions for Veterans took shape. It was as if the entire corpus of my military, professional and spiritual life had come together in this opportunity, spawned out of a crushing professional and personal nadir in my world. Now, almost 15 years later it has proven to be the right choice, affirmed and re-affirmed with every completed development in which Solutions for Veterans has been involved.
Once the immediate developments underway are finished, 535 formerly homeless Veterans will have a permanent roof over their heads, and as they move on, the resource is there for another Veteran and another Veteran, who needs a roof, a bed, and a place to call home. The housing and the good it can offer will live on for decades.
And I think it can be said without doubt that had we not done this work, it would not have been done. The facts that stirred me in the early 1980’s while writing a dissertation on public housing and private sector relocation failing to address critical housing needs were and are current today. That almost 40,000 Veterans are homeless in 2022 is both a tragedy and a disgrace, a failure of both the public and private sectors. As a country, a people imbued with patriotism, we are quick with a “thank you for your service” platitude, but maddeningly, we are unwilling to put that gratitude into something tangible (the homeless need housing) for these Vets who continue to pay a terrible price for their service.
And like those Vets, I am both proud of what has been done, yet chagrined by my inability to do more, and so much more is needed. My hope–my prayer–is that as my health and energy begin to falter, someone else will come along to take up this unfinished work, to ensure that any Veteran who needs housing can get housing with the support and respect they so much deserve.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I have alluded to this already. I made a critical pair of mistakes in my earlier work, primarily built on two assumptions: 1) people who are motivated by money will make self-interested decisions that enhance their economic positions; and 2) people who are motivated by pursuing the “moral good” will be afforded additional support by the larger community to achieve the greater good. While these two assumptions may be borne out in specific cases, my experience suggests that neither is a good foundation on which to build an organization.
My two most notable failures were driven by the same errors, though originating from very different “stations in life” by the people involved.
In the first instance, after building a very successful local housing organization over a span of seven years, I left to do other work, turning the organization over to the local leaders. Within two years, nepotism, self-dealing and jealous power struggles among the Board and Staff had relegated the organization to a dysfunctional morass that quickly failed. Had the organization continued to operate within the framework upon which it had been built, it would have continued to do excellent work in developing the community and enriching the lives of more and more people. Instead, it was all lost in pettiness and short-sighted, me-first actions.
The wisdom of the founders of this country, with the recognition of human foibles and the need to separate and balance powers would have been an important antidote to what occurred in this situation. The details of how that might have been implemented are not clear, even now, but the fact is, such sober wisdom was not even contemplated. In hindsight, the result was probably predictable.
In the second instance, trying to build a non-profit corporation from scratch with no capital, I joined efforts with an up and coming for-profit corporation where we could symbiotically utilize each others’ strengths and motivations to further the development of affordable housing. This had the initial benefit of quickly furthering the provision of housing and generating enough revenue to rapidly grow the non-profit organization. However, it had the ultimate effect of opening that non-profit up to significant and ultimately fatal vulnerabilities. By relying on the finances and directives of the for profit company, when its decisions eventually strayed from purely economic goals to personal ego and profligate ends, the non-profit was inextricably tied to the repercussions of those actions. When the for-profit company failed, that non-profit was dragged down with it.
It had been my assumption that a for-profit company would operate in a way that would maximize its profits and protect its interests. That proved in this instance to be totally wrong. Had I been more cognizant of the reality that humans will often act in ways that are totally antithetical to their economic interests I would hopefully have built in protections and firewalls that would have insulated the non-profit more effectively from the result that ensued.
On the other side of these “lessons,” as I have built Solutions for Veterans, the approach has been far more careful, and consequently, far slower than might have been the case otherwise. Instead of building a large organization, we have approached the process with one or two projects at a time, and relied as little as possible on the wealth of others to finance the housing. That said, it is not possible to do housing without huge sources of capital. Our approach has been to utilize as much as possible the more reliable sources of government funding (though far slower and pointlessly bureaucratic).
However, even then we have to use personal guarantees, front-end pursuit capital, and major corporation financing sources. It is here that the most depressing lesson has been learned, but to date not overcome (except with a fierce dose of cynicism). In a sort of irony, when individuals and corporations are faced with the choice between social mission and economic benefit, the choice will almost always be economic benefit. One would then assume that my first premise, that economic self-interest would prevail, is accurate. To be sure, as noted, don’t let thanking Veterans for their service get in the way of maximizing profits, even at the Veterans’ continuing expense. That is the reality we see daily.
However, when maximizing profits comes into tension with personal aggrandizement, however expressed, the opposite is often the case. Without naming names, one could build a long litany of corporations large and small that have pulled failure out of the jaws of success due to personal greed and primal human passions. My life experiences have proven that to both my loss and more importantly, the loss of the people whom I have committed to serve.
So the ultimate lesson I have gleaned is one I should have known from the start. Love your neighbor AS YOURSELF. To be able to serve anyone, you need to take care of yourself: physically, mentally, ethically and economically. No one else is going to do that for you, regardless of the merits of your mission and the passion of your commitment.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I have cryptically alluded to failure a couple of times now. At one point in my career I had founded and was operating the largest non-profit housing developer in Georgia. Due to no direct fault of mine, but in part due to my naivety and unmerited trust in others, it all came crashing down. A decade of work and success was brought to an end in very short order, and no quarter was given. The end was ruthless and without an exit option. At that point, it did appear that my career as a non-profit, special needs and affordable housing developer was over. At 55, I was a failure and flat broke financially.
A friend who was familiar with the situation offered some kind words which at the time I really did not want to hear. Frankly, I was shattered and was inclined to wallow in the broken pieces of my misery. However, he noted that I had not lost everything; I still had my experience, my intellect and my passion for the work. I would be okay.
And he was right. Even in the midst of working through the wreckage of that experience I was offered a job working for another developer. That eventually morphed into the opportunity to do the Veteran housing in which I am still involved. And as I previously noted, but for that failure I may not have been in a position to recognize or act upon the opportunity to do what I do through Solutions for Veterans.
In the end, if there is a source of resiliency in me, I would attribute it to two things: 1) my personal knowledge of who I am, that I ultimately believe in myself (God made me and called me “good”), and by extension, 2) my commitment to what I think is of fundamental importance–a stance of gratitude backed up with specific, tangible actions for and with the working people and the Veterans who have made the life I enjoy possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sfveterans.org