As a young teen, Anne Marie Chilcutt never gave much thought about staying in the family business, a building supply company that had been in her family for four generations.
That began to change when she was in high school and worked as a volunteer during a Habitat for Humanity build.
“Now, I tell people my favorite thing to do is frame up a house,” said Chilcutt, owner of New Home Building Supply in Columbus. “Get me out there with a nail gun on a concrete slab with house plans, and that’s what I love. If I had never had that exposure with Habitat, I may not have taken over the family business.”
On Wednesday, more than 1,000 area eighth-graders will participate in the FORGE Foundation’s “FORGE Your Path Career Expo” at East Mississippi Community College’s Communiversity where 23 local companies, all involved in construction-related fields, will introduce children to the work they do.
FORGE, an acronym for Family Organizations Recruiting Great Employees, was founded in 2018 by a group of local companies involved in the construction industry — Graham Roofing, APAC asphalt, West Brothers Construction, Burns Dirt Construction and McCrary-West Construction — that wanted to call attention to careers in construction. At the time, much of the focus on workforce development in the area focused on advanced manufacturing and the $42-million Communiversity devoted to teaching those skills.
“We got together and decided that we really needed to expose young people to opportunities and jobs in the construction industry,” said FORGE President Christee Holbrook, who also leads Graham Roofing in West Point. “No one else was doing it.”
FORGE members began visiting career-tech classes at area high schools. FORGE also created a summer camp — Camp Amp — where students could spend time working with construction equipment and learning about the different types of jobs in the industry.
But the biggest single outreach effort came in October 2018, when FORGE held its first career expo at the Communiversity. More than 1,000 middle-school students from Lowndes, Oktibbeha and Clay counties attended the all-day event where they were given hands-on exposure to everything from the simple act of hammering a nail to finishing concrete.
“We got a lot of great feedback from the schools and the kids,” Holbrook said. “We had to cancel the expo last year because of COVID, but the best feedback we received came this year when we announced we were going to have the career expo. Within 45 minutes of sending out the email announcing the expo, 95 percent of the spots were taken.”
The expo also caught the attention of other local businesses. Columbus Brick, Tronox, Waters Truck and Tractor and Chilcutt’s New Home Building Supply have since joined FORGE and will participate in Wednesday’s expo.
“We joined just a couple of months ago,” Chilcutt said, “but we had been expressing interest in FORGE early on. Then COVID hit and everything stopped. So we just officially joined in the last few months. Industry-wide, whether you are providing materials like us or are involved in the labor aspect of construction, there is a major shortage of skilled professionals, and FORGE is doing ground-breaking work in educating and encouraging the next generation of young people to realize the importance of the skill trades.”
While FORGE devotes most of its energy to reaching high school students already enrolled in career-tech programs, Wednesday’s expo targets a younger group of students.
“What we are trying to do in bringing these younger students to the career expo is to introduce them to construction jobs before they reach high school,” Holbrook said. “When kids get to high school it’s the time they begin to focus on a career path, either college or the trades.”
As a byproduct, as many as half of the kids who attend the expo will be girls, something that Chilcutt naturally appreciates.
“There are tons of good opportunities for females across the board, including even on the labor side,” said Chilcutt, who knows firsthand what it’s like to be the only woman in the room at industry-related events. “There have always been women who were trailblazers, but it’s really neat to see women realize the opportunities there are out there, even on the labor side. I think we’re going to see more and more women in industry. I love it.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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