Foundation grants foster the next generation of builders

From building outdoor classrooms and providing trades teachers with essential materials to planning the first Maryland Construction Career Days, recipients of this year’s BC&E Foundation grants have big, enthusiastic plans to teach young people about opportunities in the construction industry.

“The core mission of the Foundation is to give back to the community and help support the next generation of craftsmen in Baltimore. Through the grants, we have the opportunity to support some really cool projects,” said Matt Verderamo, a member of the Foundation Grants Committee and Vice President, Preconstruction and Sales at Alliance Exterior Construction.

In total, the Foundation awarded $14,374 to six organizations in 2022: $2,500 to ACE Mentor Program of Baltimore, $3,174 to Kennedy Krieger High School Career and Technology Center, $2,500 to the Maryland Center for Construction Education and Innovation (MCCEI), $1,800 to the masonry program at the Carroll County Career and Technology Center (CCCT), $1,900 to the welding program at CCCT and $2,500 to Tools 4 Success. Since its inception in 1998, the Foundation grant program has provided nearly $667,000 to local trades education programs.

In selecting this year’s grant recipients, “we choose the organizations where we thought we could make the most impact,” Verderamo said. “We are excited to help those organizations experience some real gains.”

Among the six grant recipients, that impact is evident.

A CPA with multiple construction industry clients, Laura Concannon founded the nonprofit Tools 4 Success in 2014 after some heart-wrenching encounters with local schools. While participating in high school career days, she regularly encountered two types of students — college-bound kids who were excited about their future and non-college-oriented kids who felt like they didn’t have good career options.

“I left one school crying. Here we have half of our students being left in the dark because the message is you can’t be successful if you don’t go to college,” she said.

Concannon knew that construction trades offered excellent career opportunities, but she also saw that vocational programs were suffering. Through Tools 4 Success, she began providing trades teachers at city schools with funds to purchase essential materials.

“I have carpentry teachers who don’t have wood or nails or drills. I have masonry teachers who don’t have bricks, stone or concrete,” she said. “If I can send them a gift card, they can purchase the basics to teach.”

At CCCT, BC&E Foundation grants this year – and in previous years – help instructors properly equip workshops to teach students the fundamentals of masonry and welding.

Masonry instructor Mike Campanile eagerly recalls the first grant his program ever received – funds to purchase reef ball forms that are used to rebuild oyster populations in the Chesapeake Bay.

“They are complicated forms made of fiberglass that you have to assemble, pour concrete, let them cure and strip them,” Campanile said.

The project not only fit perfectly with the concrete-mixing portion of his curriculum, it also got students excited about using their skills to benefit the Chesapeake Bay.

This year’s grant will enable the masonry program to purchase badly needed levels.

Meanwhile, the grant to CCCT’s welding program will enable students to complete hands-on projects – an essential part of the curriculum that covers multiple welding processes, ARC, MIG and TIG welding as well as the use of drill presses, grinders, shears, punches and saws.

In addition to class projects, “I would previously let students build a project of their choosing – most common are benches and work tables,” instructor Michael Schweinsberg said in his grant application. “Due to inflation, the price of steel has doubled and my budget no longer permits me to provide the materials they would need.”

The Kennedy Krieger High School Career and Technology Center is channeling its grant to benefit both its construction trades program and the entire school. In the peri-pandemic world, classes have been using the campus’s outdoor spaces more regularly and students have realized the benefits of more time in nature. The campus, however, lacks adequate outdoor seating and tables. The Foundation grant will fund the purchase of ready-to-assemble picnic tables and Adirondack chairs which will be built by the school’s construction students.

The activity will help students improve their ability to follow written and pictorial directions, refine and replicate construction processes, improve their motor skills and their ability to use tools, said Lindsay Turwy, Principal. Such projects also help students develop broader work skills.

“We find that students in the construction trade tend to be good team players… This also leads to these students often being seen as leaders among the student population,” Turwy said.

MCCEI, which has received seven Foundation grants since 2015, conducts multiple trades education initiatives, including the MCCEI Guest Speaker Program that arranges industry speakers and construction field trips for classes, Construction Summer Camps that expose middle and high school students to career opportunities and the MCCEI Internship Program that helps small and mid-size contractors attract interns. This year’s Foundation grant will help MCCEI advance two initiatives – volume five of its Build Your Path construction career guidebook for high school students and the first-ever Maryland Construction Career Days. 

Designed to include high school students from the Baltimore area and surrounding counties, “it will be a place where employers and organizations will come and bring their big tools, bulldozers and other equipment so that students can really get into it, get dirty and see how exciting the construction industry in Maryland is,” said Emma Shirey, Program Manager.

Finally, the ACE Mentor Program of Baltimore is again involving nearly 200 students from 13 area schools in its 15-week hands-on workshop that is conducted by more than 100 mentors from 50 local architecture, engineering and construction firms.

Many students entering the program are already interested in pursuing a career in the AEC fields. The workshops and exposure to myriad professionals, however, both deepens their knowledge of career options and sometimes refines their choices.

Shirey, who is also the Affiliate Director of the ACE program, recounts the example of one student who entered the program eager to become an architect. Over the course of 15 weeks, the boy realized that he didn’t love the design process. Exposure to other ACE mentors, however, enlightened and excited him about the work of project managers. With the aid of an ACE scholarship, he enrolled in a college program for construction management.