Manica Football for Hope Centre in Mozambique image:Architecture For Humanity

Where the Architecture Non-Profit went wrong and where volunteers hope to take it now

Last week, news broke that Architecture for Humanity, the design nonprofit founded in 1999 by Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr to bring better architecture to those in need, had shuttered its San Francisco headquarters, and would be filing for bankruptcy.

The announcement came from a story in the San Francisco Chronicleon Friday, surprising even those running the biggest of Architecture for Humanity's almost 60 chapters across the world. While the volunteers who ran Architecture for Humanity chapters knew that not all was right in the organization (as one volunteer described it, "people were disappearing" from headquarters), many didn't find out about the fact that the global nonprofit they were volunteering for had shut its doors, potentially sidelining the projects they had been working on and jeopardizing funds they had raised, until it had been reported in the media—weeks after the full-time staff had been let go. In a way, Architecture for Humanity's public unraveling mirrors the deeper problems that ultimately contributed to its demise: disorganization, an inability to adapt, and simmering tension between the parent organization and its army of volunteers......Continue Reading

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