FORGEing a new career path in construction
COLUMBUS, Miss., (WCBI) — This week kicks off the third annual BuildHer Construction Camp.
The camp held by FORGE is on the EMCC Golden Triangle Campus and area girls are learning skills they need to succeed in the building trades.
Brooklyn Sanders is an incoming Junior at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science and just as her love for education grew as a student at West Lowndes High School, so did her love for construction.
“I wanna say it was about three years ago, I did my first camp and I had a school counselor tell me about it and I was like well I’ve never really heard of anything in the construction field or opportunities for me to do this, so I was like I might as well shoot my shot at it, I might as well do it.”
And Sanders taking the opportunity to learn more about construction during FORGE’s BuildHer Construction Camp has led her to pursue a promising career path. She says she wants to be in the management side of construction. It ties together two of her other loves — math and science.
FORGE Executive Director Melinda Lowe says stories like Sanders’ and her introduction to construction are what the weeklong camp is all about. The camp, on the campus of East Mississippi Community College, focuses on various aspects of construction.
At the end of the camp, they put together their new knowledge to the test in a skills competition.
“This gives the girls the opportunity to learn all sorts of different skills. Maybe they’re wanting to learn more about carpentry, maybe it’s the electrical, roofing, we have so many different things we’re going to be showing them this week. It gives them hopefully the sense of building confidence, it’s giving them life skills and ultimately, we would love for them to go into the construction industry.
An industry in which women are underrepresented, because for years many considered it a “man’s job.” But BuildHer showcases that women can be just as successful in the industry. It also teaches them life skills that they will carry with them forever.
“We’ve had young ladies that go ‘Oh, now I know how to unstop my sink. My sink continuously gets stopped up but now I understand because we were taught this week the ins and outs of understanding plumbing, the way it’s done and why it’s done so we’ve had that conversation and a lot of times we’ve had girls after learning how to install a light fixture, they want to go home and put in a new light fixture maybe in their bathroom or their bedroom or just fix something that they’ve had a problem with.”
Lowe says they’ve had former campers want to go into construction or welding, because of what they’ve learned at BuildHer.
