Sustainable Good Housing

Dr. Kevin Prine is one of those rare individuals with the leadership talent to have created success across three different industries. 

He serves as the President & CEO of Outreach International, a global charity that eliminates extreme poverty by creating self-sustainable communities. Under his guidance, Outreach has doubled in size, halved its overhead, built a new Headquarters, been named a best place to work, and become the number one search result for “how to help people in poverty.” He recently started two mission-magnifying organizations – Sustainable Good Building Design and Sustainable Impact Funds.

Before leading Outreach, Dr. Prine was a senior executive at Tradebot Systems, arguably the most successful algorithmic trading firm in the world. His career foundation was built as a chaired, tenured professor in new venture creation and business strategy. He also led the collegiate team that won the world’s largest social entrepreneurship competition.

A solution to rural housing has the potential to elevate more than a billion people from extreme poverty. Although wealth transfers through fragmented charity and government programs do not seem to have the capacity to bring about such a change, recent advances in technology present us with many off-the-shelf answers – but these advances shout for a new combination.

How would such a combination appear?

• Safe, affordable housing that incorporates a new technology with existing solutions.
• Affordable capital that creates wealth generation for both borrowers and funders.
• An experimental sandbox to fine-tune a world-changing solution.

Technology has progressed to provide solutions to many of the problems of extreme poverty, but solutions through charity and government programs are failing to make adequate progress. With at least 1.6 billion people living in the kind of housing that magnifies their challenges, solving this problem requires recombination of appropriately priced capital, empowered community-driven answers, and aggregating a fragmented industry into a new structure that incorporates a multitude of solutions that are purchased through micro-mortgages.

Combine a single housing structure that incorporates many off-the-shelf solutions to those living in extreme poverty with micro-mortgages to pay for those solutions.

• Sustainable Good Building Design 501(c)(3): A game-changing structure that dramatically increases safety and comfort from rising temperatures, incorporates local construction, widely-available materials, culture-adaptable design, and off-the-shelf answers in LED lighting, sanitation, potable water, and a healthy environment including layout, flooring, and bed nets.  The cost is approximately USD 7,000.
• Sustainable Impact Funds L3C: A fund that provides micro-mortgages for individuals living in Sustainable Good Building Design structures. Socially responsible investing is difficult to scale, even while demand exceeds supply. Mobile phone technology has advanced to create payment transfers.
• Outreach International 501(c)(3): This nonprofit works in ten countries and has four decades of experience fine-tuning an empowerment process. It provides the initial wisdom, but also, the sandbox of 100 villages in which to experiment.

Initially, this project will serve those living in rural poverty with incomes approximating USD 3-5 per day.  This income level approximates communities in which Outreach International has worked for at least two years and provides affordable repayment of approximately USD 60 per month.  While these families are above the lowest level of extreme poverty, they remain vulnerable and unable to make progress because of these living conditions.

As a former entrepreneurship professor and business person, I have been frustrated by existing charitable and government paradigms. Although very necessary in emergency situations, they have been largely ineffective for long-term development.

Five years ago, I began working on what I saw as a potentially scalable solution.  Gain traction with an exciting, new way of constructing houses, incorporate and pay existing charities for their off-the-shelf solutions, and create a socially-responsible investment fund that gives investors a return and beneficiaries a way to pay for their own empowered solutions.

I've seen myself building houses since the age of five.

Like many others, I've also felt a life-long calling to leave the world a better place, especially while working in the company of others.

Having now led the work in ten countries as well as the academic background to continue discovering solutions through data and experimentation, I see the possibility of this life-long dream becoming reality!

Verified success across three industries:  academia, trading technology, and international development.

Navigating academia for almost twenty years while leading students on a multitude of international social entrepreneurial activities!

Piloted the turnaround of an organization that inspires the least powerful to define their pathways out of poverty. Renovated the field framework into a transformation model that creates healthy ecosystems through well-trained and monitored local entrepreneurial teams, usually led by empowered youth and women. In the last eight years, this work has permanently brought more than 60,000 people out of extreme poverty by holistically addressing challenges in health, housing, water, the environment, business development, infrastructure, and education.