Oregon Tradeswomen has announced $150,000 in Google data centers funding to support its mission of empowering women through workforce development and career opportunity in the skilled trades. The funding comes as the industry reports a record number of job openings and the fastest rise in wages in decades.

“More women in Oregon can and want to build our state’s future, but we have to remove the barriers that have kept them from these jobs,” Kelly Kupcak, executive director of Oregon Tradeswomen, said in a news release. “This funding will help us reach more people and offer them training and support services that will get them into these jobs even faster.”

With the support from Google, Oregon Tradeswomen will expand outreach to potential candidates in additional areas across the state, including the Columbia River Gorge, with focus on women of color and women with lower-incomes; offer a free, eight-week pre-apprenticeship training program resulting in an immediate increase in annual income; provide training and career pipeline support, directing women to apprenticeship programs in fields such as carpentry, construction, electrical, and plumbing; and secure new tools and equipment for remote training opportunities, including support during training such as childcare, transportation and other essential services.

In 2021, 90 percent of those served by Oregon Tradeswomen programs were low-income individuals; 49 percent were people of color and 18 percent were single parents. The organization has an 87 percent placement rate for participants who often secure well-paying jobs with health benefits and retirement programs.

“With this work, the team at Oregon Tradeswomen is building a more inclusive economy that benefits everyone” Suzanne Lindsay, regional lead for workforce development for Google’s data centers in The Dalles, said in a news release. “Careers in construction offer workers a path to family-wage jobs that are critical for building a new economy and building better communities across the region.”

These funds are part of a larger effort to connect more Americans to quality training and jobs. This year, Google is contributing $1.2 million in five states where it operates data centers toward education and pre-apprenticeship training programs for the construction trades. Google remains focused on supporting workforce and economic development across Oregon including in Wasco County. In 2021, Google provided funding for advanced manufacturing equipment at Columbia Gorge Community College’s new Regional Skills Center. The company also is supporting the city of The Dalles, the Wasco County Economic Development Commission, Port of The Dalles, the Gorge Tech Alliance and others to create a comprehensive regional economic development plan.

Google opened its first U.S. data center in The Dalles in 2006 and also operates an office in downtown Portland. Since 2006, the company has given more than $2 million in community grants to organizations in Wasco County. Since 2009, Google.org, Google’s philanthropy team, has provided more than $14 million to nonprofits and organizations across Oregon.

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Last week was National Apprentice Week in the United States, and it’s an apt recognition of those just starting out in the construction trades.

But how do people get into the trades in the first place?

In recent years, it’s been a haphazard process that normally differs from trade to trade. One common denominator, however, is that the widespread abandonment of promoting the trades as a career option by public schools has, in part, been a key contributor to the ongoing shortage of skilled trades men and women in the industry.

“I’d definitely say there is a lot of work to be done,” said Katrina Cloud, the director of student services and apprenticeships at the Northwest College of Construction in Portland. “A lot of parents help guide that as well, so really the first one who has an opportunity to have an impact is the parent and also the teacher and counselor. So if they know about those options, that this is another viable option without any debt that is incurred to the apprentice.”

The NWCC recently hired new Director of Education James Reyes in part to forge stronger ties between the building industry and the educational sector. Reyes said the proportion of apprentices with college experience or even a degree is much higher than many would assume. He attributes this to the single-minded focus of educators on the college track, largely at the expense of other options for kids who may not be well-suited for an academic environment.

“The average age of apprenticeships is much higher than you think it is,” Reyes said. “There’s a lot who go to community college or maybe university, and they’ll get so far in debt and then they figure out we’re around and they apply. And they realize they’re making more money than they can with a degree. And they don’t find that right out of high school with the college track.”

To change that, Reyes and the NWCC are busy forging different types of programming at school districts throughout the metro region. In addition, the college works with pre-apprenticeship programs and non-profit groups to draw new apprentices.

“We align with a number of pre-apprenticeship programs,” said Reyes, who formerly was the lead instructor and trainer at Constructing Hope, a Portland-based pre-apprenticeship program that specializes in working with low-income and formerly incarcerated individuals. “We have schools that interface with our facilities, K-12, and some of them do have vocational training programs.”

In addition to hosting pre-apprenticeship classes for Constructing Hope and Oregon Tradeswomen, the NWCC hosts the Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center’s pre-apprenticeship students and provides instruction. The college also works hand-in-hand with Portland Youth Builders to assist that group with its mission of educating at-risk youth about the possibilities existing in construction and technology.

Reyes said the college also is trying to build stronger ties with Portland Public Schools to bring more vocational training to the state’s largest school district.

The college also jointly offers CTE education in Vancouver’s Evergreen Public Schools district, while bringing high school students from around the metro area directly to the college for instruction through externships.

“They can go into a registered apprenticeship,” Reyes said. “That’s key. You can go to work anywhere, for any company.  That doesn’t mean it has an apprenticeship program, but the goal is to get a skilled labor force out there.”

Exacerbating the industry’s problems in attracting talent is an aging workforce that still is reeling from the loss of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Overall construction job numbers still have not returned to the glory days of 12 years ago, leaving an ever-increasing proportion of trades workers on the verge of retirement.

“If you look at the stats, in ‘99 about 10 to 12 percent of skilled trades workers were getting retired,” Reyes said. “And now it’s about 25 percent. You have had a doubling as they’ve gotten behind the eight-ball where they weren’t bringing in apprentices for the long term.”

The industry is increasingly looking to women and minority candidates to fill the gap, and with increasing success. This is boosted by public sector hiring regulations that help ensure those candidates find work.

It’s working, Cloud said, boosted by both traditional and social media advertising.

“Most of our programs these days are between 30 and 50 percent minorities,” she said. “We’re doing some really unique things. Everybody is doing social media these days, and we’re trying to relate to millennials, folks of all age ranges. We’re also looking at ways to get people connected with contractors right away; how do we make the needs of both meet?”

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Dawn Jones Redstone may have traded a hammer for a video camera, but her connection with the construction industry didn’t end with the transition from journeyman carpenter to videographer and filmmaker.

Since starting her Portland-based company, Hearts and Sparks Productions, Redstone has built a solid reputation producing what she describes as “community-minded,” documentary-style videos for clients such as Oregon Tradeswomen and the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. Recently, she released her first short feature film, which is being shown Friday evening at Laurelhurst Theater as part of the 2016 Portland Film Festival.

The 20-minute film, “Sista in the Brotherhood,” tells the fictional story of Laniece, a young black woman who is a finishing up an apprenticeship as a carpenter on a project in Portland. With just a few hours left before she “journeys out,” Laniece finds herself battling race and gender discrimination, and must make a decision whether to stand up for what is right or stay quiet to earn her journeyman designation.

The original inspiration for the film came from a work by Roberta Hunte, a professor of black and gender studies at Portland State University who also teaches courses in diversity and inclusion. Hunte, who Redstone met when both women were working at Oregon Tradeswomen, had written a dissertation that she later turned into a stage play. “My Walk Has Never Been Easy” featured characters talking about the challenges and successes they had encountered as women of color working in the construction trades.

Redstone was watching a performance of the play in Portland when she began to turn over the idea of using it as the basis for a short film. Her focus on visual storytelling, up to that point, had been mostly social-justice-focused documentaries and projects for clients. While working in construction, including six years with Andersen Construction, she had taken some video and filmmaking classes. Using that experience as a foundation, she began to build her skills in visual storytelling. After leaving Andersen, she spent nine years teaching construction with Oregon Tradeswomen and producing approximately 20 videos for the nonprofit, which helps women enter careers in the construction trades.

“I’m drawn to documentaries, but I sometimes feel with documentaries we’re talking to ourselves,” Redstone said. “People who go to see (documentaries) are already drawn to the subject matter.”

For a story about the challenges that tradeswomen face in the industry, Redstone felt a different treatment was needed.

She also realized that simply taking one character’s story from Hunte’s play wasn’t the best approach. Instead, she joined forces with Kjerstin Johnson, a Portland-based writer and editor who already had one screenplay to her credit, to come up with an original storyline that, while fictional, also contains elements of nonfiction.

“I definitely incorporated some of my own experiences,” Redstone said. “It is inspired by true stories.”

“Sista in the Brotherhood” has made a strong connection with tradeswomen, who say they experience on a daily basis many of the challenges that Redstone’s main character faces in the film.

One pivotal scene, for example, features the main character taking refuge in a portable bathroom on the job site, talking to herself as she tries to determine whether to stand up for herself or stay quiet and keep her job.

“Any tradeswoman (who’s been on a job site) knows that’s the only place you can go to have a place to yourself – to just be alone or even to cry,” Redstone said.

Redstone is quick to point out that her purpose for making the film wasn’t to bash the construction industry. But it was important to her to point out that just attracting women to careers in construction – a big push is under way in the industry – isn’t enough.

“There’s more attention (now) to women in the trades, probably out of necessity,” she said. “But there isn’t necessarily enough talk about what happens after they get there. We may be getting more women in the (trades), but how do we retain them?”

Redstone hopes the film, which is racking up an impressive list of awards, not only highlights that dilemma but also leads people – both those in the industry and those outside – to experience a new empathy for what minority women in the trades face. The reception so far indicates that she’s succeeding in those goals.

“It’s about the human condition, someone who is pushed to her own end and has to figure out how to deal with it,” said Redstone, who is Latina. “I want to give (the audience) a chance to see what it’s like through the eyes of a woman of color.”

If you go

What: Portland Film Festival grouping of seven short films, including ‘Sista in the Brotherhood’

When: Friday, Sept. 2, 5 to 7 p.m.

Where: Laurelhurst Theater, 2735 E. Burnside St., Portland

Cost: $10 (purchase tickets at portlandfilmfestival.com or at the door)

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In the roughly 30 years since Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. was formed, its membership has grown from four founders and a handful of their colleagues to more than 400 women working in the building industry trades.

The nonprofit group has established itself both locally and nationally as a go-to resource for women looking to start careers in construction as well those already in the industry who are looking to build the leadership and professional development skills necessary to advance their careers.

Women interested in working in the trades can get a foot in the door through OTI‘s seven-week-long pre-apprenticeship training program. Women already in the trades can tap into the group’s leadership development program. There’s also OTI’s Women in Trades Career Fair, an annual event that in the past has offered middle- and high-school students a chance to learn about careers in the trades as part of an OTI program to introduce girls to careers in construction.

Connie Ashbrook, co-founder and executive director, says the services and programs OTI provides are more important than ever.

“There’s more need out there than we have the capacity to serve, both on the part of women that come in our door … and employers,” Ashbrook said. “When our students are ready, they just fly out the door. Employers are hungry for our graduates.”

Ashbrook doesn’t see employers’ demand waning in the future. A key component to being able to meet that need down the road depends in large part on tapping into younger generations now, she says. At the end of the last year, however, OTI had to make the tough decision to put its girls program, which offered construction camps and clubs along with the career fair days, on hiatus.

“We had to cut back to our core services,” Ashbrook said.

Still, Ashbrook didn’t become Oregon’s first woman elevator journeyman by giving up as soon as things got rough. She says she and her staff are dedicated to getting the girls program back on its feet. They’re pursuing grants that, along with the support of industry partners, might allow some students to attend this year’s career fair as well as allow operation of a construction camp this summer.

“We do have a number of very dedicated industry supporters,” Ashbrook said. “Without them, we really could not do our work.”

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Roberta Hunte, a Portland State University assistant professor, became a career counselor at Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. in Portland several years ago. As she worked with the nonprofit group, she noticed there were few opportunities in construction and industrial trades for women, particularly women of color.

The roots of the problem stretch back to World War II, when women across the country stepped forward to fill jobs in the trades left empty as the men who usually performed them went off to fight. When the war was over, the men who came home reclaimed their original jobs, and the women returned to more traditional roles as housewives and secretaries. As America progressed socially over the following decades, there was a quiet acknowledgment that women had proven themselves as capable as men in the trades, but they were rarely seen entering those fields.

Inspired, Hunte decided to write a stage production that would illustrate the situation. The characters include a woman in her 80s who was a shipyard welder in WWII, a woman in her 40s who is subjected to a daily dose of sexual harassment and a carpenter’s apprentice who is relegated to stacking lumber instead of learning the trade. The characters in the play tell their stories to the audience, describing the struggle to do their jobs amid racism, sexism and apathy.

“My Walk Has Never Been Average” debuted on stage in Portland in February 2014 and played three more times through the year.

“It opens a dialogue, inviting people into the conversation,” Hunte said. “These women are otherwise invisible. We don’t think of them in hard hats and contributors in building the world around us.”

One showing at the Oregon Tradeswomen Institute to an audience of about 400, including women who work in the construction trades, electrified the crowd, according to Hunte.

“They saw themselves in these women,” she said. “They could relate to something about every one of them, and they felt less alone seeing other women going through the same things they’ve experienced.”

Hunte now is working on a new script with the hope that it may one day be performed in major theaters.

“I wanted my academic work engaged with real people, not just theoretical concepts,” Hunte said. “I’m hoping that it contributes to the culture.”

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Kate Barrett was hitchhiking with a friend through Oregon in the early 1970s when a chance encounter set her on a career path.

Barrett and her friend met a retired contractor who offered to teach them carpentry in exchange for their help building him a home in Carver. The two continued on to California to join a women’s commune, but when they couldn’t find it they decided to return to Oregon and take the retired contractor up on his offer.

The pay was low and they lived in a cabin that they built on the back of the property, but learning all aspects of house construction proved invaluable, Barrett said.

“We had a part in all of it,” she said. “It was really good training. We were working for nothing. We got $5 a day that we used for food. It was worth it for us.”

Because Barrett was a member of the women’s liberation movement gaining momentum at the time, learning the traditionally male-dominated trade appealed to her. It also was important to her to do more than break into the construction field.

“I felt the contribution I could make to the women’s movement was to get in and stay in,” Barrett said. “I’m going to make a career of this because that’s the only way to prove that women can do this.”

Throughout her 43-year career in construction, Barrett, 66, has been a pioneer. In 1979, she became the first woman in Oregon to graduate with a journeyman certificate from a union carpenter apprenticeship program. Barrett also was the first woman carpenter to work for the Portland Water Bureau, and the first woman to serve the bureau as a public works inspector and now as a senior public works inspector.

In 1989, Barrett and three others founded Oregon Tradeswomen Inc., a nonprofit that promotes success for women in the building, mechanical, electrical and utility trades through education and mentorship. At that time, Oregon Tradeswomen was a small, informal support group for women working in the trades. Today, the organization has nearly 400 members and offers programs that include a women’s pre-apprenticeship class and a trade careers fair for women and girls.

Connie Ashbrook, Oregon Tradeswomen executive director and co-founder, said Barrett has served as a role model for her and other women working in the trades, especially at the Water Bureau.

“I definitely admire her so much,” Ashbrook said. “She’s just a wonderful person.”

After Barrett completed her first construction job – the retired contractor’s home in Carver – she worked for several years in Portland remodeling properties for a house moving company.

“I became foreman for them and I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, so I wanted to get into the apprentice programs,” she said. “I got the runaround from all the carpentry unions and nobody would even put down my name.”

Barrett gave up on the idea for a while before deciding she absolutely had to get into an apprenticeship program. In 1975, she succeeded.

“I did have (carpentry) experience and it did help because a lot of people think women can’t do this,” she said.

After Barrett became a journeyman five years later and continued to work on home remodels, a friend convinced her to apply for a carpenter position with the Water Bureau. Barrett got the job and has spent the past 27 years working for the city of Portland.

When she first started working for the Water Bureau in 1987 Barrett was often the only women on construction sites.

“All that women’s place in the home was still going on in the bureau,” she said. “When I came here, I thought, ‘My God, I can’t believe I’m still dealing with these kinds of attitudes.’ ”

Barrett found that the best way to address her critics was with her actions.

“Working in the trades gave me so much more self-confidence,” she said. “I was more like, ‘I’m going to show them I can do this rather than tell them.’ ”

Now, Barrett is pleased that women are a more common sight when she visits job sites in her role as a senior inspector providing quality assurance of construction companies contracted for city projects.

“The culture has changed a lot,” she said. “It’s good to see.”

Barrett is proud to have helped found Oregon Tradeswomen and play a role in showing that working in construction is a viable career option for women.

“It’s making it available so it’s not climbing over a mountain to get into a trade,” Barrett said. “If women want to do it, they should be able to step in and start doing it … It’s not enough to get into the trades. You have to have the support to get through it.”

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Amy James Neel has been a carpenter for 22 years and a lead foreman for 12.  With her guidance, hundreds of regional construction industry employers – including more than 80 in the past year alone – have hired pre-apprenticeship graduates from Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. who were trained to meet industry standards by Neel.

As a job developer and construction manager for OTI, she matches each employer’s need with appropriately qualified women who have completed both a training program and an evaluation for industry readiness. The success rate of her placement is based on her methods of instruction designed to prepare students for “real world” work situations. She recently managed a group of students and tradeswomen volunteers to build OTI’s new office space in the LEED gold-rated Heritage Building on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

In the past year, under Neel’s leadership, OTI worked with 14 different community nonprofit organizations. OTI provided more than 6,300 hours of labor by students and instructors to build community projects and, at the same time, train future tradeswomen for the construction industry.

Before joining OTI, Neel owned Leftbank Construction, an all-woman company. With the help of OTI graduates, she used locally sourced and green building materials to complete the Garfield Studios project. The historic building remodel became an important link in the development efforts along MLK Jr. Boulevard.

In her personal time, she serves on the advisory board for Gladys Bikes, a woman-focused, full-service bicycle repair and sales shop in Northeast Portland.

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A U.S. Department of Labor will help Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. and its partners recruit more women into apprenticeship programs, track their progress and retain them as part of the construction workforce, according to an OTI spokeswoman.

The association partnered with its sister organizations in Washington state and California to receive the two-year, $647,748 grant, which was provided by the Labor Department’s Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations program.

The grant will allow standardization of data collection for tracking women who enter and complete apprenticeship programs in Oregon and 12 other western states, and provide technical assistance for women desiring to enter apprenticeship programs, OTI spokeswoman Mary Ann Naylor said.

“The goal is to increase the number of women going into apprenticeship programs,” she said. “Right now, we don’t have any way of reporting women who enter and complete them.”

While OTI Executive Director Connie Ashbrook was performing research for the grant application, she found that half of Oregon’s registered apprenticeship programs do not have even one woman enrolled, Naylor said.

“The ultimate goal is to create systemic change in the number of women pursuing and completing registered apprenticeship programs,” she said.

OTI received the grant in June, and has begun working with its partners to develop an online technical resource center that will be used by all state and federal apprenticeship programs in the 13-state western region. The Western Resource Center for Women and Girls in Apprenticeship and Career & Technical Education will aid education, training and recruitment.

Experienced tradeswomen also will have an advisory and leadership role in the project, Naylor said.

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Sparks flew as Kila Ung etched the word “love” onto a piece of metal.

“I got to weld the letters myself – so fun,” she said. “I like the sparks, and it changed colors, and I liked that.”

Kila, 14, tested her welding skills during Oregon Tradeswomen Inc.‘s 22nd annual Women in Trades Career Fair at the NECA-IBEW Electrical Training Center in Portland. The Portland Village School eighth-grader on Thursday was one of more than 600 girls from across Oregon who attended Middle School Girls’ Day.

The three-day fair, geared to draw more women into construction and other trades, offered hands-on activities and workshops for different age groups. On Friday, 629 Oregon high school students got a taste of various trades, including carpentry, electrical and sustainability. The fair was open to the general public on Saturday.

Many schools focus on preparing students for college with little emphasis on alternative career paths, said Connie Ashbrook, executive director of OTI, a Portland-based nonprofit. The fair is intended to bridge that gap.

“There’s not really a venue for especially young girls, young women, to learn about (the trades),” she said.

The best way to show women that they could become a carpenter, welder, electrician or other skilled tradesperson is to let them try it out, Ashbrook said.

“For all of our attendees, the more hands-on the better,” she said. “This is the way that girls and women can experiment with the tools to be successful in the trades.”

This is one reason why some schools have made fair attendance a tradition.

“We have many, many teachers who for many, many years come back with their young women,” Ashbrook said. “You actually get to make something and take it home.”

The opportunity to try carpentry and welding is a big appeal for Kila. After attending last year, she was eager to come back.

“Building a house was really fun,” Kila said. “I would do it as a job.”

Kara Putman, 14, an eighth-grader at Tillamook Junior High School, spent a portion of the fair building a wooden puzzle. She appreciated being able to put school lessons into context.

“I really like math and science, so I thought it would be good to experience this type of thing,” Kara said. “It’s a good experience to find out what I like.”

The hands-on activities were fun, said Sabri Freeman, 14, a Portland Village School eighth-grader. But she also liked meeting tradeswomen and learning from them.

“It’s inspiring to see these women doing jobs that some people think are only meant for men,” she said.

Her eighth-grade classmate, Delaney McEvoy, 14, agreed.

“It’s really empowering,” she said. “I can do this too.”

This is why Sam Batman, the receptionist at Phoenix Charter School in Roseburg, regularly brings a group of high school girls to the fair.

“They leave feeling powerful,” she said. “I bring them because this wasn’t done for me as a kid, and I wish it had been.”

Before becoming a receptionist, Batman was a heavy equipment operator. She started at age 30, but would have entered the construction field sooner if she had been aware of opportunities in high school.

Every year, Phoenix Charter School students hold fundraisers like bake sales and car washes so they can attend the fair.

“They talk about it the whole ride home,” Batman said. “They’re like, ‘I didn’t know this existed, let alone I could do it.’ It just shows them opportunity abounds.”

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Oregon Tradeswomen Inc. will host its 22nd annual next week.

The three-day event, geared to draw more women into construction and other trades, will take place May 8-10 at the NECA-IBEW Electrical Training Center in Portland.

Each day, different age groups will be able to participate in hands-on activities and workshops, said Mary Ann Naylor, spokeswoman for OTI, a nonprofit. Middle School Girls’ Day and High School Girls’ Day will take place May 8 and 9, respectively, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Careers for Women Day, on May 10 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., will be open to the general public.

Participants will be able to try out firefighting equipment, climb a utility pole, use welding tools, wire a light and switch, learn about solar and wind power, build wooden birdhouses or tool boxes, and engage in other activities, Naylor said.

On the days catered to high school students and the general public, more than 70 exhibitors will be in attendance to share information about various industries and entry-level positions.

One highlight of the event, Naylor said, is a tradeswomen fashion show. Women working in the trades model their gear and tools, and share how they got into their fields.

“It has such an impact on the school-age girls,” she said.

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