Habitat for Humanity will be helping families in the Drumheller community in the near future.
The non-profit organization will be creating a chapter in Drumheller as part of Habitat for Humanity Southern Alberta (HHSA).
Heidi Lambie, Regional Development Manager, explained to council members at Monday night's Council meeting, the plans the organization has.
“I am hoping we can form a chapter aggressively by the end of this year, and start having meetings so that they can come up with a strategy. Our wish is to start building by 2017 in the spring,” she said.
Albert Clark has donated land on Poplar Street and recently HHSA has taken title on the property.
“This journey has taken us over a year. As of September 2015 we have title of the land and we can build two individual homes on this property,” she told The Mail.
She said the property is zoned for individual homes and HHSA hopes to go to council and see if the land can be re-zoned to allow for two duplexes.
Lambie explained that the chapter would consist of “community members who are volunteers (who) come together with the common goal of wanting to build affordable housing for low income families. We are looking at people who have the time and the desire to meet monthly and come together to figure out the strategies that they need to do,” she said.
Lambie said the chapter would consist of various committees. The fund development committee would raise funds required to build the home, and the family services chair and committee would be responsible for recruiting families and helping them to meet the criteria including the 500 sweat equity hours that are required.
She mentioned the construction chair would be liaison with the director of construction, who is in Calgary, who would assist in getting the project through the various construction requirements including building permits while the volunteer chair would work to recruit volunteers from the community.
During her presentation to council, she mentioned that the Drumheller Institution’s Inmate work release program has partnered with HHSA to assist in building the exterior walls of HHSA’s High River duplex and has shown strong interest in assisting with this project as well.
“We are very fortunate for the inmates, along with their supervisor, who came on site to build. That was huge for us in helping us to keep the project on time,” she said.
The building would not begin until 80 per cent of the funds were available, but Lambie said the organization’s goal is sometime in spring of 2017.