Just as she did more than 40 years ago, Habitat for Humanity Founder Mary Lyons-Carmona is building homes with families, only now she is keeping others’ affordable homeownership dreams alive as a volunteer.
Lyons-Carmona founded Habitat for Humanity of Omaha in 1984. At age 24, she read a Reader’s Digest article on the Habitat for Humanity “experiment” that began in 1976 in Americus, Ga., and decided to pursue an affiliate in Omaha.
“Something in the article grabbed me,” Lyons-Carmona said. She was working for another nonprofit at the time. “One month we were helping a family prevent an eviction, and the next month we’re helping them with their utilities being shut off.
“I thought this isn’t working.” Lyons-Carmona said she was getting frustrated and burned out because no matter how much she did, she could not change a family’s overall circumstances.
“This (Habitat for Humanity) experiment looks like it gets to the root of the problem,” Lyons-Carmona thought. “Habitat was different because it built a person up. Owning a home changes the whole trajectory of a family. It builds health and wealth.” Unlike her previous experience of people needing help in the moment, “People working with Habitat for Humanity were only asking for an opportunity,” she added.
“Habitat does not build for low-income people; we build with them. And as Habitat for Humanity’s Founder, Millard Fuller, said, ‘Even the poor should have the privilege of giving back.’ That stuck with me.”
That philosophy was my “leap of faith,” Lyons-Carmona said. She and her late husband, Bill, who was blind, drove to Americus, Ga. “We lived down there for a month and learned things about fundraising, organizing volunteers and all that type of stuff.”
She began with hardly any money. In fact, she borrowed from her earnings at a full-time job to keep the young enterprise alive during improving but difficult economic times. The economy in 1984 was growing but still suffered from high inflation and a 7% unemployment rate. She even moved in with her parents to save rent for the new venture.
She applied for Omaha’s Habitat Charter in 1983. Now, Habitat Omaha serves nearly 1,200 individuals and families annually, including more than 100 new homeowners last year.
That is Lyons-Carmona’s legacy. Her grassroots efforts are not recorded or archived in filing cabinets or newspaper articles, but in the families who earned homeownership and their children, who will live in stable homes and benefit from generational wealth.
“We were so busy doing, you’re not really thinking about keeping records. You’re talking to people and building community. That pretty much takes all your energy.” The first Habitat Omaha-built home on 37th and Spencer Streets took almost two years to build. It was a volunteer and community effort involving churches, high school students and neighbors.
Lyons-Carmona left Habitat Omaha in 1986, but she remains firmly connected to the mission to create affordable homeownership opportunities for hard-working families.
Every fall, around her birthday, she tries to celebrate by taking a hands-on approach to helping others.
Four decades later, on a crisp, late-October morning, Lyons-Carmona is Mary the volunteer. She joins her family – daughter Cathy and grandsons Briley, 20, and Brody, 18. The family, along with friends, staff, and other volunteers, work at a Bluestem Prairie home-build site, hammering, sawing, and helping to build another Habitat Omaha home.
Things are much different now, but Mary’s vision and community building established a strong foothold in Omaha that is positively changing lives through first-time homeownership for hundreds of families.
“I’m very happy with what it (Habitat Omaha) has become,” Mary said. “I’m very proud of it. I want to continue Habitat with my kids, grandkids, and soon, twin great-grandsons born in January 2026. It is nice to have this type of Legacy, you know, that has filtered down and become something they can get involved in.”
However, it is not about her legacy and history, said Lyons-Carmona, who retired as a history professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha. It is making the “original inspiration and radical idea” of coming together and working together out of faith to improve people’s lives a reality, she added.
“I taught history,” Lyons-Carmona said, but as Amanda (present CEO Amanda Brewer) says, ‘I guess I can dream.’ “