Once upon a time…

Our kid’s book section is filled with all kinds of magical fairy tales, swashbuckling adventures, and instant classics. Each child we serve gets a bundle of those books, donated by a neighbor, then organized, selected, and packed by volunteers. In their comfy new bed or chair, kids explore all kinds of new stories. That has us thinking about tales of all kinds, and how a good story can bring into focus the connections between seemingly unrelated things.

As an example, this past Saturday on a delivery day, in the span of about 60 minutes, I witnessed these stories:

• A grandmother who spoke a different language than I needed no words to tell us how she was feeling watching her empty apartment fill up with furniture (and excited grandkids!). She simply handed us a tray of cookies and candy, and with a hand on her heart and tears spilling down her cheeks said, “Please, take.” We did, and they were tasty.

• A delivery volunteer who recently moved his mother to an assisted living environment and donated decades of her things (including a table he had scratched up nearly half a century ago as a child) was asked to load up some artwork for a recipient. In a serendipitous twist, one of the pieces he held had just 2 weeks prior been on his mom’s wall.

• A different delivery volunteer (a regular) shared with me that a total chance connection made a few weekends back with a volunteer who was getting a PhD in chemistry has led to her son (another regular delivery hand) getting some expert help in his homework.

There can be no complete telling of the story of our work, in part because there’s not enough paper or attention in the world. But also: the resilience, belonging, and community that we are building together so often transcends description.

But this month we’re releasing our annual report out into the community as our best attempt to tell that story. I hope you take a moment to check it out HERE, and when you look at the big numbers all throughout the pages, remember that each one is a beautiful, unique story. Don’t believe me? Look in the mirror! If you’re reading these words, then you are already in our 2026 tale.

Together we make it home.

See you out there,

Ian

Read the rest of our April 2026 newsletter here.

1. Check our item guidelines (housesintohomes.org/donateitems).

2. Complete our pickup request form (housesintohomes.org/requestpickup).

3. Send photos of your items.

4. Prepare items for pickup.

5. Consider making a financial donation.

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Title Sponsor: Ball, Kirk & Holm, PC

Food Sponsor: Watts Group

Drink Sponsor: Nicole and Matt McCormick

Flag Events Sponsor: Hills Bank

Golf for Good wouldn't be such a successful event without their support!

Join us this Friday, when the weather looks promising! There’s still time to register your team or individual golfer, and while we've got the same number of teams as last year we're still short of our overall goal. Food and drink (two with each ticket), two chances at flag events, and of course the golf are included, and lots of great prizes!

Friday, March 6th will be a fun afternoon of golf, food and support for the important work Houses into Homes does to transform empty living spaces into healthy, safe, and comfortable homes.

housesintohomes.org/golfforgood

SIGN UP HERE!

Grab your clubs and invite a friend — we’d love to see you there!

It’s our birthday! You’re reading this almost exactly 8 years since Houses into Homes made our first bed delivery, on February 2nd, 2018. Since then we’ve delivered 3,747 beds to 2,203 households, helping 6,647 of our neighbors live in greater comfort and stability. We’ve done that while diverting countless tons of furniture (over 2,000 tons, or roughly 150 semi-loads full) from our landfill.

It’s not only the number of households and pounds of furniture we measure: we’ve spent most of those years collecting data on the individual and family effects as well. And not just on what might be considered the direct impact of having a bed to sleep on (in our most recent cohort, 86% of adults report better sleep and 85% say their child is sleeping better). We also measure secondary impacts like the sense of community belonging, work and school performance, parent-child relationships, and overall stress. Spoiler alert: all are remarkably improved after furniture delivery. 

Together we are improving lives, and those improvements are rippling out all throughout the community. And the best part is we’re just getting started. This month Houses into Homes became a founding member of Furnish Together, a national coalition of furniture banks working to bring awareness to the issue of furniture poverty. If you saw the map of our deliveries from our December newsletter you know that furniture poverty exists in every neighborhood and in the homes of neighbors from all walks of life. That’s true nationwide, and the research we’ve done is helping inform the work of furniture banks everywhere. In part because of our community, home furnishings in the US will soon be widely recognized as a basic need, and furniture poverty will soon be widely understood as a problem that can be sustainably and economically addressed. 

Of course, the wider you make the aperture and the bigger the numbers get, the harder it can be to truly understand the humanity of the work. So I’ll leave you with a quote from literally the most recent of those 2,203 deliveries, completed this past Thursday. This text is from the mother in a family of four, with two young daughters living in the same North Liberty neighborhood I lived in for three years prior to moving to Iowa City:

“We would like to thank the volunteers and Houses into Homes. You have changed our lives today. It’s been months since we felt the joy we felt today. Thank you kindly for everything you guys do”

I can’t think of a more meaningful birthday present than this! And so, like any eight-year-old after their birthday party, some thank you cards are in order for the countless gifts shared as we head into year nine:

• To all of the item donors who made this delivery possible: Thank you for trusting us to care for your gently-used furniture once its usefulness in your own life has passed. 

• To all of the volunteers who contributed to this delivery: Thank you for offering up your valuable time and expertise to refurbish, sort, inventory, select, and deliver a full household of furnishings to yet another fellow neighbor. 

• To this family: Thank you for welcoming us into your space and trusting us to help transform it, and for giving new life to many well-loved local furnishings. 

May this new home be a wellspring of comfort, rest, togetherness, and joy for many years to come. For the family inside and the community that literally and figuratively surrounds it. Welcome to our ever-growing neighborhood!

Together we make it home.

-Ian

Julia is in her final semester of a social work degree, we're all that stands between her and graduation.

She'll be a familiar face around the warehouse and around town over the next few months. She's already joined us at Iowa City's MLK Jr. Day volunteer fair and remembrance program, on a delivery route, and on a furniture pick-up shift.

Of her first few days at Houses into Homes, she shared: "I'm so glad my practicum experience will involve so much out in the community and not 400 hours in front of a computer!" Congratulations and welcome, Julia!

Join us at Tiffin Pinseekers for an afternoon of golf, fun, and community impact — all while supporting our mission to end furniture poverty in Johnson County.

Friday, March 6

1–5 p.m.

Register by February 9 to be entered into a raffle for special prizes! Sign up here: https://www.housesintohomes.org/golfforgood

Grab your clubs and invite a friend — we’d love to see you there!

Together we make it home.

Each week, Houses into Homes receives generous donations from our community. Many items go directly to families filling their homes, but items that we do not give to our recipients are shared with other agencies serving Johnson County.

A while ago, we were so graciously gifted 1,200 Le Mutt & FiFi stuffed dogs and started dreaming up ways to spread the love. A couple of our amazing volunteers took that dream to heart—adopting the pups and making it their mission to ensure kids in our community who are going through something tough, whatever that may be, receive one. 

The following is a list of service agencies that have received stuffed animals from our 'Operation: Dog Distribution' project:

Ambulance Services
Animal Shelter
Artifacts, Iowa City
CommUnity Free Lunch
Crowded Closet
Domestic Violence Intervention Program
Every Blooming Thing
Fire Departments: Coralville & Iowa City
First Presbyterian Church
Free Little Libraries: Kirkwood, Trueblood, Alexander, Oaknoll, Gloria Dei, NCJC, Marcy
Goodwill
HACAP Head Start
Hope Lodge
Little Creations Academy (now closed)
Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County (Broadway and Pheasant Ridge)
Once Upon a Baby Store, Coralville
Open Heartland
Our Redeemer Preschool

We receive lots of puzzle donations here at HiH, which means so do recipients (along with the table and chairs of course). If you enjoy puzzles, you understand the simple joy they can bring to an ordinary day. And perhaps you also understand the frustration of discovering a piece is missing after hours of work. 

We don’t want to deliver that future moment of aggravation to our neighbors, so volunteers assemble gently-used puzzles fully to make sure no pieces are missing before they are packed. This unique inspection task was completed dozens of times in 2025–by church youth groups (lots of kid puzzles!), at retirement homes, in workplace breakrooms, and by regular volunteers assembling them at home in between weekly shifts–marking them “complete” and grabbing a new puzzle to test.

When we celebrate New Years, there's a natural pause to reflect and take stock of the year that was…to consider how the yearly “puzzle” just passed can be marked “complete” before turning ahead towards the next one. With any luck (and a little attention), lessons learned from past puzzles help piece together entirely fresh ones. This is as true for non-profits as it is for you. At HiH, the puzzle of 2025 was quite a ride!

For just a moment, take in the full picture: 1,240 neighbors (roughly half of whom are children) in 420 households receiving over 700 beds. We transformed homes and lives while diverting around 200 tons of furniture from our landfill. Each of these numbers are records for HiH in our seven years.

But this barely scratches the surface! We know a whole is much greater than the sum of its puzzle pieces, but even the separate pieces for HiH last year are remarkable: 1,100 volunteers contributing 9,000 hours to ensure our inventory from over 2,000 item donors is in like-new condition.  Ready to be safely delivered all over town to neighbors hoping to build—or often rebuild—their own home. This way, they’ll have the crucial pieces of a bed, a desk and lamp, a couch, a baking sheet and more, among their resources. For every neighbor to experience the comfortable home that all deserve, each household “piece” becomes itself an intentionally crafted puzzle. It’s a dizzying, interconnected community with puzzles inside puzzles to create and solve!

The fun part (if you’re not already having fun)? You are an integral piece of this whole. Yes, we mean you, reading these words right now! However large or small your contribution may first appear, our work last year would be in some way less than whole without it. Even reading our newsletter makes the completed picture richer, enhanced by the light of your attention diverted from an internet AI landfill (see what I did there?). Now zoom out and consider that HiH’s work to improve our collective quality of life is itself merely a small piece of a large Johnson County puzzle. And so on and so on, from a global perspective all the way down to a jigsaw-shaped box on a refurbished coffee table down the block. Thought of this way, perhaps it’s not so outlandish to say: In telling your friend to donate their mattress instead of tossing it to the curb last year, you changed the world. 

To all of our recipients, volunteers, donors, supporters, sponsors and neighbors–you matter...far more than you (or even we) could know. You not only wholly belong in this community, you are essential to it. We could not have been quite complete in 2025 without your presence and contributions, in whatever form that took. The same is true for the new puzzle, made up of yet to be revealed pieces, that together we’ve already begun assembling in 2026. 

May that thought be as refreshing and invigorating for you as it is for us. And if you’ve recently made a resolution to volunteer on behalf of your neighbors this year, know there is a contribution at HiH that only you can make. There are plenty of seats at our puzzle table and it would be a pleasure to prepare you a welcome. That’s kinda our thing! After all…

Together we make it home.