Portrait
Name
Olive Williams
Company
National Indigenous Collaborative Housing Inc.
Location
Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL
Description
Olive Williams is from the territory of Labrador in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. She is a member of the Nunatukavut Community Council (NCC), they are the southern Labrador Inuit.
Olive was born in a small, coastal, remote community of Cartwright. She currently lives in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, which is part of her birth territory. She worked in Business and Finance Management with both profit and non-profit organizations for several years. She even tried to leave her territory to work as an accountant with the OFIFC in Toronto. Even though it was nice to visit, she didn’t like working downtown but thought OFIFC was great.
After a few attempts at applying for jobs with NCC, in 2019, she finally landed one (don’t ever stop trying) as a Project Officer for the Home Repair Program, and she has not looked back since. Olive became interested in renewable energy as some of the communities are diesel-dependent. Reducing the carbon footprint for generations to come and ensuring a cleaner, greener environment for her people is essential to her.
Housing is of keen interest to Olive. She grew up in the 1970s in a community where only the middle class and elite had running water and a good heat supply. Her family was not part of any of those groups, they were like many other native families, but they were happy and a close single-parent family of nine kids, of which she is the youngest.