Giving Compass' Take:

• Vehicles for Changes, a nonprofit organization in Oregon, is converting old school buses into tiny houses for homeless families.

• How can funders help support tiny homes as an avenue to bring families out of homelessness?

• Read about why tiny houses alone will not solve the housing crisis.

The rains came down sideways. We had one hour to get our first new “skoolie”—a school bus converted into a tiny house on wheels—out of the construction yard and into its new home at an RV park. We needed to get Betsy the Wonder Bus plugged into power, test the hot water heater and get the fire going in the brand new wood stove.

This would be its first night as a home for an unsheltered family. Made by our newly minted nonprofit, Vehicles for Changes, Betsy rolled down the highway to its new space at the Jackson Wellsprings RV Park just outside of Ashland, in the southernmost tip of Oregon.

Everything worked as we checked it off: stove and oven, kitchen sink, shower tile set, toilet flushed. The air was warm, the beds made. Eight months of drilling, hammering, pounding, lifting, and straining had paid off. In a gravel lot, we had created a complete house, downsized to fit in the footprint of a school bus.

While there’s a growing movement amid skyrocketing housing prices to transform school buses into homes, appropriating them to shelter the homeless, as we are doing, is still unique. Ours is the only nonprofit we know of housing children this way.

Read the full article about converting buses into tiny houses by Julie Akins at YES! Magazine.