National Council on Agricultural Life and Labor (NCALL)
Joe Meyer, executive director
PO Box 1092
Dover, Del. 19903
(302) 678-9400

This group consciously focused on a single mission: providing affordable housing for poor, rural people. Under that umbrella, however, it does a number of things.

The group, originally started in 1955 as a national advocacy group, went dormant in the 1960s but was resurrected as a regional organization for Delmarva Peninsula because the US Department of Labor and the Washington-based Rural Housing Alliance had grant money and needed a responsible group to administer it in the region. Since then, it has grown from a staff of 3 to a staff of 16, with a $500,000 annual budget financed about 90 percent by federal money. NCALL has overseen the construction of at least 350 units of rural, low-income housing by about 10 rural housing co-operatives that they have helped get organized.

NCALL does not itself build housing but oversees and provides technical assistance to non-profit groups that do. It insists on local ownership to insure that the money gained is reinvested, not taken as profits.

Meyer and his staff primarily help non-profits work through the maze of red tape and bureaucracy involved with federal funding and help them take full advantage of Farmers Housing Administration money, which in some cases can provide money for multiple-family housing on loans as low as 1 percent and for single-family housing loans available for families with incomes as low as $8,000 per year.

NCALL also has a FmHA contract for the northeastern U.S. to organize self-help housing projects in which a group of neighbors band together to build houses for them all.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

Send him E-mail.

Back to the @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG Home Page