Women Build participants at Newburgh Habitat take a break after working on a house on Wednesday
NEWBURGH – After a hard morning’s work fixing up a home in the City of Newburgh, local volunteers came together to eat, talk and celebrate their community service.
Each year, women from all walks of life build and repair homes and buildings during Habitat for Humanity of Greater Newburgh’s National Women Build Week.
This year’s project was a property on 24 South Miller Street in Newburgh and a tool clinic at Habitat Newburgh’s office. Once the foundation was laid and the walls and floors were intact, generations of women sat down for a luncheon to give themselves a much-needed pat on their sore backs.
Habitat Newburgh’s Executive Director Cathy Collins could not be more proud of the event’s dedicated women volunteers.
“It’s when women come together and a lot of women learn how to utilize construction skills and they volunteer in unity to help the families acquire these homes,” Collins said. “Being a woman leader, obviously, I am very thrilled about the fact that we have a very strong volunteer community of women. “This week, while a national week, is also the time we get to really celebrate the women who build with us all year long.”
Thus far, seven homes have been built, including this year’s project. An eighth construction project is on the way, which is especially exciting for Collins.
“Eighty percent of the volunteers on that particular house are women,” she said. “It is not as though we are excluding men, we are just trying to include women in a nontraditional way with construction. It is not an industry which has been as open or has had as many women involved in it.”
To this end, Collins had contractor Vivian Rizzo of Hudson Valley Handywoman offer assistance to the women volunteers.
“I am hoping to complete all of the projects we have for this year and to help those who are not familiar with doing construction,” Rizzo said.
Celeste Bloom, a longtime volunteer and house captain for this year’s project, added that while construction projects can be intimidating to those who have never worked on one before, Habitat for Humanity’s annual event is all about celebrating the friendships you make throughout the project.
“It’s a time for women to get together and revisit each other,” Bloom said. “Some people may think ‘Oh, I’ll go when there is a new group of people, and they’ll calm me down. Here, we celebrate ourselves and the friendships we make and the work we do’.”
Habitat for Humanity’s National Women Build Week has been held every year around Mother’s Day since 1991, and the results speak for themselves. As of 2014, 2,300 homes have been built, and the dedicated community of female volunteers does not show any signs of slowing down.
