Giving Compass' Take:

• Alexandria Lafci explains how New Story 3D prints houses for families in Haiti, Mexico, and Bolivia. 

• How does 3D printing increase the scalability of housing programs? What are the drawbacks of this approach? 

• Learn about the importance of housing the homeless. 

Alexandria Lafci was 24 years old and stuck in a job she hated when she decided to pursue an unlikely dream: Building homes for families in need around the globe. She had learned so much in her first job out of college and now she wanted to apply that experience: The Teach for America alumna had seen firsthand how homelessness affects a child’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

So together with her co-founders, Alexandria launched New Story, a nonprofit that is transforming slums into sustainable communities by harnessing the power of 3D-printing technology. In 24 hours, their organization can “print” a new, 600-square-foot home for under $4,000. So far, they’ve constructed homes in Haiti, Mexico, and Bolivia. By next summer, the organization hopes to build an entire community of 100 homes in El Salvador.

Rajesh: How did you come up with the idea of 3D-printing homes?

Alexandria: We built those 6,500 homes through traditional methods, but we realized we were growing incrementally. So how can we have an exponential impact, not just for us but for this sector. There are a lot of organizations and governments that are building homes. How can we help all of them? So we asked ourselves, Can we build homes faster? Can we build them less expensively without sacrificing quality and even increasing quality?

After a lot of research and talking to people, 3D-printing just kept rising to the top. Then we met a construction technology company called ICON and we developed a 3D-home printer with them in a few months. It’s unique in that it’s meant to work specifically in the areas that we work, in places like rural Haiti where there is very rugged terrain, using locally available materials, being very easy to transport, being very easy to operate.

Read the full interview with Alexandria Lafci about New Story by MJ Altman at United Nations Foundation.