Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue sits at the far western tip of Montreal Island, where the West Island meets Lake Saint-Louis, and on Rue Sainte-Anne the volunteer-run Thrift Shops for NOVA general store has become one of the neighborhood’s steady sources of secondhand goods for the whole family. This is the flagship location of a network that traces back to 1998, when volunteer Elizabeth Parker, inspired by the tradition of English charity thrift shops, opened a small operation called Le Coin des Trouvailles in this same village. That single storefront grew into the Sainte-Anne Volunteer Health Support Foundation, formally established in 2004, and over roughly twenty-five years more than 350 volunteers across the organization’s locations have raised close to eleven million dollars for NOVA West Island community health care services, including home care and palliative support for local families.
The Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue store, found at 43-3 Rue Saint-Anne, is the broadest of the organization’s outlets, carrying clothing and footwear for men, women and children alongside furniture, jewelry, artwork, antiques, kitchenware and home decor. Dedicated sections for seasonal items, toys, pet products and crafting supplies round out the mix, making it a reasonable one-stop browse for a household clear-out replacement rather than a single-category specialty shop. Everything on the floor arrives as a donation from West Island residents, is sorted and priced by volunteers, and is sold at prices well below retail, with all proceeds returned directly to the health foundation’s mission rather than to any corporate parent.
The shop keeps regular hours Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, making it accessible on weekends when many other charity resale outlets are closed. Shoppers can reach the store directly by phone or email to ask about current stock, oversized furniture pickup, or upcoming donation drop-off windows.
What distinguishes this location from the other four Thrift Shops for NOVA outlets scattered across Beaconsfield, Kirkland, Pointe-Claire and Dorval is both its role as the founding store and its unusually wide category range within a single space, spanning apparel, furniture and decorative antiques rather than splitting those categories across separate storefronts the way Beaconsfield does with its furniture-focused sister location. The Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue store also sits a few doors from the organization’s dedicated bookstore on the same street, so a single visit to the village can cover both a clothing and home-goods browse and a separate stop for books and media, all funding the same cause.
Because every item passing through the store is a community donation, inventory changes week to week, and regulars often describe the appeal as much about the unpredictability of what turns up, whether that’s a piece of antique furniture, a child’s winter coat, or a set of glassware, as about the prices themselves. For visitors to the West Island looking to combine a thrifting stop with support for a locally rooted health charity, this flagship Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue location offers the fullest cross-section of donated goods in the entire NOVA thrift network, all in service of a foundation that has funneled millions of dollars in resale proceeds directly back into community-based health care for West Island families.
