Building Something That Outlasts Us

This week, Pacifica students had the privilege of spending time with Jeff Rutt, founder of HOPE International and Keystone Custom Homes, and his daughter Alisa Hoober, for a conversation about work, entrepreneurship, generosity, and what it means to build a life oriented toward the good of others.

Jeff's story begins in an unlikely place: a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. After nearly a decade of farming, he entered the homebuilding business and founded Keystone Custom Homes in 1992. What began with 12 homes in its first year has grown into an award-winning company that has now built homes for more than 10,000 families.

But the most compelling part of Jeff's story is not simply what he built. It is what he learned along the way.

In the early 1990s, Jeff began traveling with his church to post-Soviet Ukraine. Their intentions were good. They brought containers filled with food, clothing, medicine, and other necessities to people experiencing tremendous hardship.

Then a Ukrainian pastor told Jeff something difficult: Your help isn't helping.

The free goods were meeting immediate needs, but they were also creating dependency and making it nearly impossible for local businesses to compete. Their generosity was unintentionally weakening some of the very people and communities they hoped to strengthen.

Jeff listened.

That recognition—that their well-intentioned efforts were actually doing harm—became the beginning of something much better. Rather than retreating from the problem, Jeff began asking a different question: How do we help people use the gifts, abilities, and ideas God has already given them?

The search eventually led to microfinance. In 1997, HOPE International was established, and its first program in Ukraine began with just 12 small loans of approximately $500 each to local entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs invested the money in their businesses and repaid the loans with interest.

Nearly three decades later, the scale of that work is remarkable. By the end of 2025, the HOPE network had served more than 3.6 million families, equipped more than 18,000 local churches, and disbursed more than $1.96 billion in loans. In 2025 alone, HOPE's microfinance programs served nearly 100,000 new clients and disbursed $148 million in loans, with a 97.1 percent repayment rate. Its church-based savings groups welcomed more than 173,000 new members and equipped another 2,100 local churches.

What began with 12 small loans in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, has become a global movement investing in the God-given dignity, agency, and dreams of millions of families.

And Jeff couldn't have built it alone.

When those first loans were repaid and demand quickly grew, Jeff began calling his tradespeople, vendors, business partners, and fellow homebuilders, some of whom were competitors. Instead of simply asking them to write checks, he invited them to participate through the work they already knew how to do. Builders built. Tradespeople and suppliers contributed their work and profits. A community formed around a shared mission.

Over time, that collaboration became Homes for HOPE, harnessing the talents and resources of the building industry to invest in entrepreneurs and families around the world.

There is something deeply Christian in that progression: act, fail, listen, learn, invite others in, and try again.

Jeff's story is also a story about what business can be for. Keystone became extraordinarily successful, but Jeff increasingly saw the company not merely as an asset to own but as something to steward. In 2019, he donated 89 percent of Keystone's ownership to the National Christian Foundation. 

Our conversation with Jeff, therefore, wasn't really about becoming a homebuilder or even starting a nonprofit. It was about vocation.

What gifts has God entrusted to you? What problems have you been given eyes to see? Who are the people you need alongside you? And how might the work of your life become an instrument for the flourishing of others?

We continued that conversation later that evening around a small dinner on campus with friends. The setting was different, but the question was much the same: What are we building that will outlast us and where have we experienced radical generosity in our lives.

These are precisely the kinds of conversations we want our students to encounter at Pacifica. We want them to become excellent at their work, certainly. But we also want them to develop the imagination to see their education, relationships, businesses, resources, failures, and successes as gifts to be stewarded.

Jeff's life offered our students a compelling picture of what that can look like. And for that, and so much more, we are incredibly grateful! 

Thank you to our friends at National Christian Foundation and Cojurn for bringing this event together.