Business Fit Magazine October 2019 Issue 2 | Page 18

Interview
start to do some philanthropic work. The year
was 1994, the year Nelson Mandela became
President. My favourite Mandela quote is
‘poverty, apartheid and slavery are not natural,
they are man-made and can be solved by the
actions of human beings’. He summed up that it
was about the ‘system’. Systems either create a
path - an inevitable path to poverty or a path to
opportunity and wealth.
In our quest to give back we sought to donate
to a charity helping people overcome challenges
and thoughtfully created a path to self-sufficiency
and potentially wealth. After a few months of
research, I realised that charities were not set up
to solve the root causes of the problem. The only
metric they used was encounters, such as how
many people they fed, or sheltered, overnight.
That was it? Where was the data on how many
people get back on their feet? I was personally
appalled to think that albeit well-intended there
really was not an overarching plan or system
either philanthropically or publicly funded that
actually helped to address root causes. It was
almost impossible to access the help for people
to get back on track without going through
lots of hoops and different places. Instead the
frustration left them hopeless and my research
showed a trend of them becoming generationally
dependent on the system. That is when I
learned the system was not only fragmented,
piecemealed and broken, but very expensive
and financially unsustainable! My heart went out
to those who ended up trapped in the “system”,
especially for the mothers with children and our
military veterans who deserved so much better.
As a finance professional, I needed an ROI to
justify parting with my hard-earned money. I was
determined to find a way to accomplish both the
idea of giving back and getting a return on my
investment as a real estate investor and towards
making a real social impact.
Since inception, our philosophy was doing well
through doing good. Our work is proof that
they are not mutually exclusive terms. A Safe
Haven LLC and A Safe Haven Foundation are
hybrids which integrate this concept. Although
we seek donations and public funding for the
foundation to provide more people access to the
social services, we also have continued to take
the risk by investing in more real estate. Today
we own a substantial affordable housing real
estate portfolio which continues to provide safer,
professionally managed and maintained housing
for those we serve and who are in distressed
communities lacking quality affordable housing,
which has continued to build our wealth.
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