Team of Women Start Work on New Habitat House in West Tuscaloosa

It was a special morning for a young mother as a team of all-women volunteers began work in earnest on a newly built home in West Tuscaloosa, where she will move in months from now.

Habitat for Humanity of Tuscaloosa builds affordable houses for those in need, which they purchase at fair market value through zero-percent interest loans if they qualify and spend a required amount of time helping to build the structure.

The nonprofit is approaching the halfway point on the buildout of a new neighborhood on Milestone Circle in the West End consisting entirely of Habitat Homes.

On Wednesday, Habitat was back in the subdivision with Rickelle Riley, a nurse assistant at the VA Medical Center in Tuscaloosa. Riley and her three daughters will move into the new house when it is finished in about 90 days.

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Riiley and a couple dozen women were hard at work assembling what would become the frames for the walls of her house.

"Words really can't explain how excited I am. I can't stop smiling. I'm trying to hold back the tears," Riley said. "It's a meaningful thing for me because this is my foundation.
There are women out here building this foundation for me and my girls, because this is going to be a house full of women. So this is the perfect build, the perfect moment, the perfect foundation. I'm so excited to have women volunteering here because that lets my girls know that we women can build too. We can get things done too."

The Women Build initiative is a nationwide one for Habitat, but one that only really took off in Tuscaloosa last year, when Terri Saban was on-site to help build a Habitat Home dedicated in honor of the long-term support the nonprofit received from Mrs. Terri and Nick Saban and their Nick's Kids Foundation.

Now, a year later, a new Women Build worksite is humming with volunteers, even without the celebrity of the Sabans involved.

Romel Gibson, the community outreach coordinator for Habitat, was also at the site to praise the work of the volunteers.

"We only have five full-time construction supervisors, and then everybody else who helps us build the house would be volunteers," Gibson said. "It's especially special because of the Women Build going on here today. Our Habitat affiliate is led by a woman and we believe that women have just as much ability and the rights that men do as far as working the construction. To be able to do a women's empowerment project where they fund the house they volunteer to work on, that's what Habitat is all about."

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