A Brush with Kindness is a Habitat program that mobilizes volunteers to provide exterior home maintenance assistance to low-income homeowners. It addresses a critical and often overlooked need: After years of deferred maintenance, homes fall into disrepair. This can lead to a downward spiral: code citations, the loss of homeowner insurance, and ultimately mortgage foreclosure. These effects hurt not just individual homeowners, but also entire neighborhoods. In most metropolitan areas, few housing programs help low-income homeowners with their housing maintenance issues.

Under this program model, homeowners are eligible to participate in A Brush with Kindness based on factors such as the condition of the home, income, and a demonstration of challenging circumstances such as disability, illness or age that prevent them from doing the work by themselves. Qualifying homeowners contribute sweat equity by working side by side with volunteers to complete the work if they are able.

Volunteers perform the vast majority of all the work on these homes. Volunteers are recruited through businesses, churches and community groups. Volunteer teams of various sizes are matched with homeowners to work on and complete assigned tasks.