Volunteers, Home Depot Foundation revamp South Florida veteran’s home

Twenty volunteers spent the day painting, cleaning, landscaping and handling other repairs at Valencia Lewars’ South Florida home, turning a local service project into a clear example of how Home Depot deploys associates in the community.

Lewars, who served as a supply clerk, watched the work transform her Miami house through Team Depot and Rebuilding Together Miami-Dade. The renovation focused on practical upgrades, not ceremony: landscaping, painting, cleaning and other face-lift improvements that made the home more livable while putting a veteran homeowner at the center of the effort.

For Home Depot workers, the project shows how the company’s community work often depends on real labor from employees, not just donations or branding. Team Depot is Home Depot’s associate volunteer force, and the Miami project fit a broader pattern the company has built around veteran housing, skilled trades and disaster response. The foundation says its mission is to improve the homes and lives of U.S. veterans, train skilled tradespeople to fill the labor gap and support communities hit by natural disasters.

The scale behind that mission is large. Since 2011, the Home Depot Foundation says it has invested more than $650 million in veteran causes and improved more than 70,000 veteran homes and facilities. Team Depot says it has worked with nearly 15,000 nonprofits and completes, on average, five projects a day in local communities. In 2025, the foundation launched its 15th consecutive Celebration of Service campaign, and Home Depot said more than 30,000 veterans were still experiencing homelessness despite years of progress.

The Miami project also came as the foundation crossed a major giving milestone. In March 2026, Home Depot said the foundation had surpassed $1 billion in charitable giving, and it added another $30 million in veteran-home grants, underscoring that this work is part of a long-running investment rather than a one-time publicity push.

South Florida has seen the pattern before. Team Depot previously partnered with Rebuilding Together Miami-Dade to help fix up the home of Army veteran Harry Johnson and his wife, Stephanie Johnson, and Martina Spolini, the group’s executive director, has described veteran home repairs in the area as long-running efforts. That is what makes the Lewars project distinctive: it blends local repair work, veteran branding and associate volunteer labor into one visible neighborhood project.