Story

Over the past 40 years, working closely with our community partners, Niagara Peninsula Homes has been at the forefront of community economic development, social enterprise and non-profit/cooperative housing development, and has helped shape our community towards an inclusive vision of creating opportunity for all.

That same vision continues and is evolving under REACH Innovation to take on the challenges of the present times. We have recently been approved to run a multi-year construction skills program for youth, funded by the Government of Canada (ESDC/YESS) which will carry the name REACH Construction Program. Concurrently we will be developing various innovative social enterprise and affordable housing initiatives.

We look forward to sharing that Vision with you all through this web page, our facebook page and our ongoing community outreach.

History

In 2007, Niagara Peninsula Homes (NPH), started planning to run several ‘work experience’ programs for young people who may be interested in any of the skilled trades, in property maintenance, or simply in exploring career and post secondary education options.   The work we do is geared around general construction labouring skills where many entry level jobs are available and also provides a good foundation for many other jobs as it encourages the development of both “hard” and “soft” skills which are highly transferable.

Niagara Peninsula Homes launched The Team E.N.E.R.G.I Program (Enterprise Niagara for Employment Resources and ‘Green’ Initiatives) in 2008 and has since gone through various iterations of the program. The Team E.N.E.R.G.I concept was simply an idea for much needed change within Niagara, which has been developed by a team of dedicated professionals from both private enterprise and Not-for-Profit agencies. The expertise of the principle partners ranges over the fields of: employment counselling, pre-employment training and skills development, health and safety training, program development and delivery, project management, and building technology. 

The government announced funding for energy-saving retrofits, we took on this for our co-op and non-profit housing in the region while also providing work experience for youth. In September 2009. The first Team ENERGI group began through a partnership with private contractor David Young, who agreed to co-ordinate and supervise the program. The program provided affordable building retrofits to non-profit housing providers in the Niagara region using teams of young apprentices. 

In 2012, Niagara Peninsula Homes purchased a building for their new head office in Welland. It was a grocery store when the building was first constructed in the late 1930s. In the decades that followed, its large windows were bricked up and the building was transformed into a warehouse for a local electrical supply company that eventually sustained fires and became derelict for several years. In 2013 the building became a living lab classroom, NPH started being restored and revitalized by participants of a program, and the two-year project came to an end when it celebrated the grand opening of its Community Resource Centre on September 18, 2015.

Onto 2020, our program is now called REACH (Renovation, Education, Accessibility for Communities through Housing Innovation.) our mandate is still to connect young people looking for skills training and work experience with various community projects in need of assistance in Niagara. These programs support the immediate needs of each community or group we work with, as well as the future needs of our labour force, in preparation for a “new economic revival”, and a new future for Canada and for Niagara…ideally a ‘green’ future. This “new economic revival” is being increasingly driven by a demand for competent technicians, in all the emerging technologies and industries, in new product research and development, as well as a continuous demand for skilled trades people generally.