Habitat to dedicate Pawtucket home

PAWTUCKET – Habitat for Humanity Rhode Island-Greater Providence will dedicate its first project outside of Providence Saturday.
The 23-year-old chapter has never before built a house outside of Providence, Executive Director Herman deKoe told Providence Business News this week.
“The attention is always to Providence and the need may be the largest in terms of numbers there but that doesn’t meant that Pawtucket and Central Falls and maybe North Providence are not in need of affordable housing as well,” he said.
The Pawtucket duplex marks about the 66th project for Habitat, deKoe said. It was constructed largely by volunteers and the future homeowners during the past 18 months. Now complete, two families will move in and each own one side.
On Saturday, Habitat will dedicate a duplex in memory of Paige Hicks, a Brown University student killed while bicycling across country as part of a fundraiser. Some of the money she raised flowed to the Providence Habitat chapter. She and her team had been at the Pawtucket site volunteering in the weeks before her death, deKoe said.