People in your community and all over the world partner with Habitat for Humanity to build or improve a place they can call home. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. With our help, Habitat homeowners achieve the strength, stability and self-reliance they need to build better lives for themselves and their families.
JONATHAN RECKFORD, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
With experience ranging from Wall Street to the local church, Jonathan Reckford brings professional leadership skills and a passion for service to his role as chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity International.
Reckford was influenced greatly by his parents, who were active in the civil rights struggle, and by his grandmother, New Jersey Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick, widely known for her commitment to justice. She encouraged him to account for the lost and left out in the world.
A native of North Carolina, Reckford graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Scholar. After undergraduate school, he began his career as a financial analyst in 1984 at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. He found the work professionally stimulating but not a good fit.
After leaving Wall Street, he was awarded a Henry Luce Fellowship to live and work in Asia for a year. Reckford did marketing work for the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee and coached the South Korean rowing team in preparation for the 1988 Olympic Games. That was also a pivotal year in using the distance, time and perspective to fully embrace his Christian faith.
He returned to the United States to work on his Master of Business Administration degree from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business with a focus on nonprofit management. Stanford was one of the first business schools that believed that the same skills needed in business were also needed in the public and nonprofit sectors.
With the goal of being a positive influence in the business world, he developed strong leadership skills and gained valuable experience working in executive positions at companies such as Marriott, The Walt Disney Co., Musicland and Best Buy.
After helping integrate Musicland into Best Buy, he left with the goal of moving into the nonprofit sector. During time off required by a noncompete agreement, he went on a mission trip to India, where he was inspired to devote his life to helping the world’s poor. The path from India to Habitat was neither immediate nor direct. He first served as executive pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Edina, Minnesota. Friends called that decision career suicide, but Reckford says every position taught him valuable leadership skills that prepared him to lead Habitat.
In August 2005, he was unanimously chosen as chief executive officer by the board of directors of Habitat for Humanity International, a global Christian housing organization that has helped more than 13.2 million people construct, rehabilitate or preserve their homes. Since Reckford took the top leadership position, Habitat’s more than 1,300 U.S. affiliates and over 70 country programs have grown from serving 125,000 individuals a year to helping more than 3.5 million people annually build strength, stability and self-reliance through shelter.
Reckford serves on the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Duke Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Urban Steering Committee for the World Economic Forum. He was named the most influential nonprofit leader in America in 2017 by The NonProfit Times.
He is the author of Creating a Habitat for Humanity: No Hands but Yours, which is framed around messages found in Micah 6:8. He and his wife, Ashley, have three children and live in Atlanta.