OUR VALUES
Dignity
Dignity is not something that is earned or granted. It is not a reward for good behavior or a benefit extended to those who qualify. Every person who walks through our doors — regardless of their history, their income, their circumstances, or their mistakes — carries inherent worth that no financial crisis can diminish and no eviction notice can erase.
At Agape we do not help people despite their difficulties. We work alongside them because of our shared humanity. That distinction shapes every policy we write, every conversation we have, and every decision we make about how this organization operates. Dignity is not a value we aspire to. It is the floor — the non-negotiable starting point from which everything else is built.
Restoration
Restoration begins with an honest look at what has fallen — and the conviction that falling is not the final word. West Virginia communities have absorbed decades of institutional loss. Schools have closed. Buildings have emptied. People have left because the conditions that make a life possible were no longer present.
Agape exists in the belief that what has been lost can be reclaimed — not returned to what it was, but rebuilt into something that serves the people who are here now and the generations who will follow. Restoration is not nostalgia. It is the active, practical work of rebuilding the conditions that make community possible — one property, one family, one repaired relationship between landlord and tenant at a time.
Together dignity and restoration are not decorative words on a mission statement. They are the operating instructions.
OUR MISSION
Agape Community Works Foundation provides stable, dignified, affordable rental housing in underserved West Virginia communities — not for our neighbors, but with them.
That single word — with — is the entire philosophy.
For too long the relationship between housing providers and the people they house has been transactional at best and adversarial at worst. Tenants as problems to be managed. Landlords as obstacles to be navigated. A system designed around enforcement rather than stability, around extraction rather than investment, around the assumption that the people who need housing most are also the people least capable of participating in decisions about it.
Agape was built on the opposite conviction.
The people who live in our properties are not passive recipients of our generosity. They are participants in a community that we are building together. Their voices shape how we operate. Their stability is the measure of our success. Their dignity is not a program feature — it is the foundation the entire organization stands on.
We do not arrive in communities with a plan and ask people to fit into it. We arrive with a framework — financially disciplined, evidence-driven, and grounded in decades of research — and we build within it alongside the people who already know these communities better than any outside organization ever could.
Not for our neighbors. With them.
That is not a slogan. It is a commitment — to every tenant, every community partner, every donor, and every person whose life this organization has the privilege of touching.
Dignity and Restoration at the Core of Our Work
Rooted in Dignity and Community Restoration
Founded in West Virginia, Agape Community Works confronts rural housing challenges by converting existing surplus buildings and distressed properties into dignified workforce housing. We believe treating tenants with respect while supporting their stability creates lasting community impact and financial sustainability.
OUR Team
Terri Brown
Founder, President
Terri H. Brown did not come to this work from a position of comfort. She came from the same place many of the people Agape exists to serve come from — a childhood shaped by poverty, instability, and the kind of uncertainty that makes the future feel like something that happens to other people.
What changed that was not a single moment but a slow accumulation of something more powerful than circumstance — faith, community, and the stubborn conviction that the conditions you are born into do not have to be the conditions you die in. The people and communities that showed up along the way did not rescue her. They walked alongside her. That distinction became the foundation of everything Agape is built on.
Life did not get simpler with time. A serious injury brought its own set of limitations — chronic, real, and permanent. But limitation has a way of sharpening focus. What cannot be done by force has to be done by design. That shift — from pushing through to thinking through — became a professional asset and a personal philosophy. The Tenant Stability Program is in many ways the product of that lens: a mechanism designed not to overpower a problem but to solve it structurally, at the root, before it becomes a crisis.
Terri holds securities registrations and brings a background in financial services, from banking to insurance to securities, to the work of building a financially disciplined, evidence-driven nonprofit. She returned to West Virginia — to Ripley, Jackson County, where she has put down roots — because the work that needs doing is here, and because home has always been worth building.
Agape Community Works Foundation is not a departure from that story. It is its conclusion — and its beginning.
Eddyth Hope Buckingham
Director
Eddyth Hope Buckingham is, in the truest sense, a West Virginia original. Her roots run deep in the soil of this state — not as a metaphor but as a lived reality. She knows what it means to grow things, to tend them with patience, and to understand that what comes from the earth requires care, commitment, and the willingness to show up season after season regardless of what the weather brings.
That same philosophy governs how she moves through the world. Eddyth has built a life around generosity — not the occasional kind that feels good in the moment, but the steady, habitual generosity of someone who has simply decided that caring for the people and creatures around her is what a life is for. Family and friends are not obligations to be managed. They are the point.
She brings to the Agape board something that cannot be taught and is rarely found in governance documents — the wisdom of a life well and generously lived. She knows her neighbors. She knows this community. She knows what it looks like when people are genuinely cared for and what it costs when they are not.
In a mission built on the conviction that housing is an act of love, Eddyth Hope Buckingham is exactly the kind of voice that keeps that conviction honest.
Perla Pierce
Director
Perla Pierce brings to Agape's board a perspective forged in the complexity of urban life — the particular kind of strength that develops when you learn early that the systems around you were not designed with you in mind, and you choose to show up anyway.
As a Latina woman she has navigated spaces that did not always make room for her, and built presence in them not by asking permission but by understanding deeply — people, systems, community dynamics, and the specific ways that faith becomes not a comfort but a compass when the road is uncertain. That understanding is not abstract. It is lived, and it informs every conversation she brings to the work of Agape.
Family has been both her anchor and her education. For Perla, family has never been defined strictly by blood. It has been defined by choice — by the people who showed up, stayed, and built something together regardless of what the paperwork said. That definition of community — chosen, committed, and rooted in mutual care — is precisely the definition Agape operates from.
She joins this board because the mission is personal. Housing is not an abstract policy question. It is the place where family — however you define it — becomes possible. Stable housing is where chosen family gets to stay chosen.