Through innovative partnerships we help to make affordable shelter and home ownership a reality for more people.

Our relationships with partners in the housing sector contribute to neighbourhood renewal through the development of affordable shelter for low to moderate individuals and families, including students, seniors, newcomers (immigrants and refugees), people with disabilities and Aboriginal peoples.

Nearly fifty-percent of ACU’s affordable housing financing is invested in, and helping to renew, inner city neighbourhoods. People like Martha Abalo, who spent 15 years in a refugee camp, have benefitted from our partnerships with organizations like Heart Housing.

When Martha Abalo fled the civil war in Liberia to a Ghana refugee camp, she thought it would be a temporary rest stop.

She was wrong. She and her family spent the next 15 years in wretched conditions, begging and bartering for scant water and rice, in what ended up to be a death trap for many of her fellow refugees. It was not the life the university graduate and former Liberian Department of Agriculture marketing analyst had imagined for her family.

“It was like sleeping outside,” she says of the tent that served as home for her first five years in the camp. “The snakes and scorpions would come and people would die from the bites. The water would come in and wash right under us. Everything would be soaked. Too many people died that way. I knew without a house at the refugee camp we would die.”

The refugees started the arduous task of building their own homes from the mud found just outside their tents. Martha was finally sponsored to Canada and arrived in June 2005. Her new challenge was to find affordable housing in a land where she had no credit and no assets.

Enter Heart Housing and ACU. Heart Housing, a homeowner grant program for low-income immigrants, offered Martha some of the down payment she needed to buy her home. ACU, working closely with Heart Housing, provided her mortgage.

Ruth Vince, one of the founders of Heart Housing, is reaching out to immigrants who can’t seem to get ahead. This is especially true if their housing is subsidized because when their income goes up, so does their rent. Ruth credits ACU with giving Heart Housing the support it needed to get off the ground in 2004.

“They were our business loan advisors and they really supported our idea to help people in the community. They helped connect us with other groups that could help, like SEED Winnipeg and the Jubilee Fund. They supported us and they trusted us.”