The Home Depot Canada Foundation surpasses $50 million in support of youth experiencing homelessness

Community giving campaign and new grants help achieve funding milestone

TORONTO, April 7, 2022 /CNW/ - The Home Depot Canada Foundation has surpassed its goal to invest $50 million to support youth experiencing homelessness. This commitment has grown from an initial investment that began in 2013 when it first announced a $10 million three-year pledge towards helping prevent and end youth homelessness in Canada.

"We're incredibly proud to be able to give back to our communities everyday and recognize this milestone that our customers, associates and vendor partners achieved together," said Pamela O'Rourke, vice president of merchandising, The Home Depot Canada and chair of The Home Depot Canada Foundation. "However, the latest studies show that youth continue to make up approximately 20% of the homelessness population in Canada and they have been impacted significantly through the pandemic. It remains very clear there's still a lot more to be done to end the cycle of homelessness in this country."

In December 2021, The Home Depot Canada Foundation's bi-annual community fundraising campaign, The Orange Door Project, raised close to $1 million in donations made in-store and online. To celebrate its customers' shared values of giving back, the Foundation doubled the results with an additional $1 million investment, resulting in more than $2 million distributed to 124 youth-serving charity partners across the country.

In addition to increasing support for the Orange Door Project campaign partners at a local level, The Home Depot Canada Foundation is announcing several incremental grants. The Foundation will distribute $3 million to its 15 Regional Partners to support innovative programming advancements that help prevent youth from experiencing homelessness, and $500,000 to TradeWorx partners to put an additional 50 youth experiencing homelessness into skilled trades careers.

More than 200 local and national organizations have received funding annually from the Foundation's commitment over the years, to support research, housing and life skills development programs for at-risk youth and youth experiencing homelessness.

"We work with some of the country's leading experts on homelessness to help inform our initiatives and ensure our Foundation dollars are invested in critical programs that support youth directly," said Amy Bilodeau, sr. manager, community investment, The Home Depot Canada Foundation. "We share a collective belief that all youth deserve the supports necessary to create meaningful futures. We're so grateful to work alongside them and are looking forward to continuing that commitment and announcing the next phase of our investment in the coming months."

The Home Depot Canada Foundation is a Canadian registered charity that is committed to preventing and ending youth homelessness in Canada. Since 2013, the Foundation has invested $50 million and worked together with community partners across the country, to remove barriers, break cycles of inequity, and enable youth at-risk of or experiencing homelessness to achieve positive development outcomes and build brighter futures. For more information, visit: www.homedepot.ca/foundation.

The Home Depot is the world's largest home improvement specialty retailer. At the end of the third quarter, the Company operated a total of 2,317 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico, including 14 stores in the U.S. from a small acquisition completed during the second quarter of fiscal 2021. The company employs approximately 500,000 associates. The Home Depot's stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index.

SOURCE The Home Depot of Canada Inc.