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8/26/2024
This themed build day wildly surpased our expectations, and was a MASSIVE success!
We have wanted to do a themed build day for quite some time now, and a Women Build was clearly the perfect choice for our first. Generally speaking our worksites have 4-8 volunteers on any given day, or 8-12 during a corporate group day. However on Monday, we had over 40 people working!
The wonderful women who joined us completed between two and three weeks worth of work, in just a single day! Not only were there a ton of people working, but all of them were hard workers, completing all of the priming in our larger new construction build, and completely finishing all of the painting, start to finish, in all but one room in our other new construction build.
Even though its clear to see the shear amount of work accomplished on Monday, accurately quantifying the impact these women had is rather difficult. Yes, they all made a huge impact on the construction of these two homes, but they did much more than that too. Many people on site were familiar faces, returning volunteers, but many were also new! Every time we get someone new on site, that is an accomplishment worthy of celebration.
In addition to the amount of work however, many of these women have sparked conversations throughout the community, talking about Habitat and what we do, which as we hope you know, is invaluable.
The impacts don’t stop there though. They impacted two local families as well. A team of professional painters would charge between $5,000-$7,000 to paint each of these two houses. Considering just how far we got with each of these, its safe to say the financial impact (money Habitat doesn’t spend, and therefore expenses not transferred to their mortgage) was amazing for both families. Every $1,000 saved during the construction project, is roughly $20 per month saved for the families for five years. That’s means there’s an extra bag of groceries, every month, for two families, for 20 years. That’s amazing!
The last impact that needs to be mentioned, is the impact these women had on our community as a whole, but also for all our local women. These 40 individuals are serving as inspiration for the next generation, showing them what is important. Between the financial impacts described, the time saved on our projects, the chatter/discussion they’ve spurred in the community, the impact on our partner families, and the impact on our organization, we can’t overstate how grateful we are to all of them.
Our work would be impossible without volunteers like them!
If you are interested in volunteering, with a group or on your own, please email [email protected]
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