ValleyBuild helps residents in CA’s Central Valley get apprenticeships with trade unions as part of the area’s workforce development initiative.
Instructor Tony Flores shows students in the ValleyBuild program how to measure and cut a pipe during a lesson in a workshop at the Fresno Area Pipe Trades Training Center in Fresno on Oct. 28, 2024. ValleyBuild is a pre-apprenticeship program that helps people in the Central Valley get into the skilled trades and ride the wave of upcoming infrastructure projects.
“That six weeks — it was only six weeks, but it changed my life,” said Rowberry, who has been working as an electrician since graduating the program in late 2019. “It changed my life.” It wasn’t always that way: Construction was historically a “hidden” industry compared to agriculture in the Central Valley, Konczal said. But in 2010, a regional economic outlook report came back showing approved public infrastructure construction would be worth about $40 billion through the next decade.
Outside Fresno, counties included in the 2020 expansion have customized the program for their own needs. In Kern, home toactive oil fields, many tradespeople work on heavy industrial sites, said Alissa Reed, executive secretary of the Kern, Inyo, Mono Counties Building and Construction Trades Council. All ValleyBuild pre-apprentices in Kern complete OSHA’s Hazardous Waste and Emergency Response or “HAZWOPER 40,” which teaches them to respond to the release of hazardous material.
For Rowberry, the electrician, entering the trades out of homelessness felt like the last option. Her associate’s degree in accounting had failed to provide more than minimum wage job opportunities. Before ValleyBuild, she wasn’t even able to attend the welding class she’d signed up for because her car died.
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