WOMEN OF LOWE’S CANADA RAISE THE ROOF FOR FAMILIES IN NEED

For the second consecutive year, Lowe’s Canada and Habitat for Humanity teamed up to mark International Women’s Day by bringing women from the Lowe’s store network together to make a concrete difference for lower-income women and families.

When Gaëtane Lamarre got an email from her manager at L’entrepôt RONA Laval looking for volunteers for the International Women Build Week, she didn’t think twice.

“I said yes right away,” she says. “I hoped I’d be chosen to participate.”

The event, a partnership between Lowe’s Cos. and Habitat for Humanity, has been taking place during the week leading up to March 8, International Women’s Day, since 2008. It sees women from across the globe come together to build affordable homes for Habitat for Humanity. For the 2020 edition, Lowe’s Canada and Habitat for Humanity Quebec teamed up to renovate a five-plex building in Montreal’s SouthWest borough.

Twenty women from the Lowe’s Canada network got involved. This year, Lamarre was the lone participant from the RONA banner, joining women from Réno-Dépôt stores and the Boucherville head office.

Tania Ricciardi of Réno-Dépôt Marché Central was a returning participant this year. At the inaugural event in 2019, she was joined by one fellow associate from her store. “We enjoyed it and passed word of mouth around the store,” she recalls.

This year, she was joined by about half a dozen colleagues.

Jean-Sébastien Lamoureux, senior VP of public affairs, asset protection and sustainable development at Lowe’s Canada, says the company’s involvement with the Women Build Week is a natural development. When Lowe’s brought the event to Canada last year, Habitat for Humanity already had “a significant partnership with the U.S. business, but here in Canada, we were also very supportive,” he explains. “So this Women Build Week is something we decided to partner with across all our geography.”

For Lamarre and Ricciardi, the event allowed them to see firsthand the difference their team was helping to make in a neighbourhood where one-third of households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

“In the beginning of the day when we started, we got to see one of the Habitat families who were introduced,” Ricciardi recalls. “Just to hear their story was very moving.”

Ricciardi says the impact of the experience lingers back at work.

“At the store itself we’re in different departments,” she explains. “I myself work in the office. I don’t get to see a lot of my colleagues who work on the floor, so just to get to work with them and get to know them a little better was a highlight.”

Lamarre calls the experience “an excellent day with many strong moments,” especially “being all together to form a human chain to remove the waste” from the build.

According to Lamoureux, motivation to participate in the build is strong.

“I think to bring our women together, but also to support safe and affordable housing for women, is something that resonated in our organization,” he says. “So that’s why it was very easy to recruit people within Montreal to go spend the day renovating.”

Lamarre concurs. Her verdict on the event is emphatically positive: “Very well organized, very serious and conscientious. I hope to be able to do it again next year.”