Growing up in a large Catholic family with means, Nancy Pulte remembers her and her 13 siblings—her father was married three times—being assigned a family member to make a present for Christmas. “We all hated this, especially the older kids, because you would get a rock from the 5-year-old [sibling],” she laughs.
Their parents would then gift each of the children one toy. All the money that would have been spent on gifts for the large brood went towards adopting a family in need. “We kids would have to help do the shopping and the wrapping, and then we would go and have a party,” she says. “That’s where I really attribute our beginning of understanding that it’s not about you. … It was to help teach us that we had enough.”
Nancy’s father, Bill Pulte, was a carpenter by trade; he built his first home at 18, then founded Pulte Homes in 1956 (now PulteGroup). Today it’s considered the third-largest homebuilder in the country. When Bill died in 2018, he left his entire estate to charity. “My dad was a huge philanthropist. He was known as the quiet giver,” Nancy says. “It wasn’t ‘til the very end of his life that his church asked him to put a name on a hall, you know, a community center, and he agreed.”
The family founded the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation, focusing on education, shelter, hunger and thirst, and caring for others. Nancy serves as the president of the foundation and sits on the board of directors with her brother, Mark, and her father’s widow, Karen. In June, the foundation celebrated the opening of The IDDeal Place in Lake Worth Beach, a community built for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities [IDD].
“They’re so vulnerable. They can be so easily taken advantage of,” Nancy says. “The IDDeal Place … is only the eighth residential facility for persons with IDD in the state of Florida. We’re the first in Palm Beach County … yet we have thousands upon thousands of people looking for beds.”
Giving is also engrained in the foundation’s work culture. Employees with more than one year’s tenure are given a stipend to donate to a nonprofit of their choice that falls under the foundation’s four pillars. The Pulte family also involves every generation—to even the youngest members of the family, as children are given $100 to donate to a cause each year. (pultefamilyfoundation.org)
HUMANITARIAN HOTELS: We renovated [hotels from my father’s estate], then we set them up as what we call humanitarian hotels, which means that 100 percent of the net profits will come back to the foundation and our mission of giving. These three hotels … have really found a way for all the extra food from every banquet, every wedding, all that is wasted, [to] go to the local food banks. We employ persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities as hotel cleaners. … There are multiple ways that you can do humanitarian efforts in the restaurants. Every martini you buy one week might go to one of the organizations that we support.
HOMES FOR IDD ADULTS: There is nothing, nothing being done for persons with IDD. We rank 49th in the nation for services for persons with IDD, when you age out at the ripe old age of 22. They get such few dollars to help them, and we have something like, I think, in the state of Florida, 50,000 people that have IDD. [20,000 people with IDD are on a waiting list for essential services—Ed.] So the biggest question for parents of children, forever children with IDD, is who’s going to take care of our children when we’re gone?
IN THE WORKS: The second long-term transformational project that we are currently working on is on the other side of the state in Immokalee, Fla. … Monarca will be 184 single-family two-, three-, and four-bedroom homes for workforce housing. I think the beauty of this is we’re not developers. We don’t get a dime out of any of those.
BOCA’S GENEROSITY: With The IDDeal Place, we could have never made it over the hill without some of the generosity of some of the families here in Boca Raton. … I do think that we have a tremendous amount of those [amazing] people in this community. Part of the problem is, and I did have one donor tell me this, there are so many great causes. I don’t know how many thousands of nonprofits are just in Palm Beach County alone. There’s so many good people doing good things.
This Hometown Hero is from the November 2026 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
