In 2019, Alexis Rowberry was living in a Fresno County homeless shelter with her two kids, recently out of what she described as an abusive relationship. “We had nothing,” she said.

Fiona Kelliher

CalMatters

She found herself at the Fresno County Department of Social Services, staring at a flier.

“They had something up on the wall about trades,” said Rowberry, now 40. “It wasn’t there the day before, and it wasn’t there the day after. It just happened to be there that day. And I told my [social] worker that I wanted to do this program.”

She tried signing up, but she was denied — against policy, she later discovered — because she was a single mother without housing. In desperation, she contacted the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, where a sympathetic secretary helped connect her with an alternative: ValleyBuild, a pre-apprenticeship program that prepares Californians for careers in the skilled trades.

“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.”

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ValleyBuild: A Path to Economic Opportunity

ValleyBuild was born out of the Fresno Regional Workforce Development Board in 2011 with the goal of helping economically disadvantaged Californians, including women and people who have had contact with the criminal justice system, enter the state’s growing trades industry and potentially reach the middle class.

In 2020, after a transportation-focused California senate bill allocated funds to workforce training programs, the state awarded ValleyBuild $1.56 million from the state which the organization used to expand into 13 more counties across the Central Valley. The program has trained roughly 1,000 people since its founding.

The construction and trade industry is “a growth sector by all empirical standards” in the Central Valley, said Blake Konczal, executive director of the Fresno Regional Workforce Development Board. Data from a board-commissioned study show a projected $24 billion in public infrastructure expenditures between 2026 and 2031, as compared to about $22 billion between 2020 and 2025.

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From Hidden Industry to Economic Driver

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. High-speed rail, slated to eventually run from San Francisco to Los Angeles, would add an additional boost; state data show the project has created nearly 12,000 jobs so far, mostly in the Central Valley and mostly union.

Konczal’s team saw an opportunity for locals, particularly those in precarious economic positions, to ride the wave. Although the region’s poverty rates are on the lower end of California’s spectrum because of housing costs, Central Valley poverty would be about 14 points higher than it is today without safety net programs, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

“If the worker comes from L.A. or the Bay Area, they might be renting a motel room here with four or five colleagues, and they might be going to Denny’s, but we don’t get the full benefit of keeping that money in our local economy — and the social stability that’s created when hardworking people have access to jobs that allow them to feed their children, buy a house, maybe take a vacation,” Konczal said.

Breaking Down Barriers to Success

Funded by five state and regional grants totaling about $16 million, ValleyBuild’s approach is straightforward. Participants are trained in a six to 10-week multi-craft core curriculum, which introduces them to different trades and prepares them for years-long apprenticeships. The potential payoff is big, with California trades offering six-figure incomes with benefits, pensions, and union membership.

The program has maintained a 98% graduation rate through its expansion, in part because it tries to “knock out all the barriers in the enrollment,” said Ashley Mattthews, senior project coordinator at the Fresno Regional Workforce Development Board. That includes reimbursing participants for gas mileage or bus services, and even expenses such as car repairs or drivers’ license application fees.

A recent $1.4 million grant from the California Department of Industrial Relations has meanwhile allowed ValleyBuild to provide stipends for childcare support, which will “open the doors for more women to even see this as a viable option for them,” Matthews said. Organizations across the state are similarly looking to increase the numbers of women in the skilled trades.

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Adapting to Regional Needs

Outside Fresno, counties included in the 2020 expansion have customized the program for their own needs. In Kern, home to more than a dozen active 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.

The Kern program plans to double its annual participants from about 50 to 100 in anticipation of more renewable energy-related jobs over the next decade. But the county is also closely watching for political shifts — including a potential Trump presidency — that could affect the market for the skilled trades, particularly tax credits, government subsidies and funding for renewable technology, Reed said.

“If we don’t see the jobs, then we will slow down,” Reed said. Kern has maintained a 100% apprenticeship placement rate for its last two cohorts. “We are not in the business of training people to train them.”

A Life-Changing Opportunity

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.

Five years later, making nearly $40 an hour plus health insurance and a pension, “I don’t worry about if my car breaks down, because I can afford to fix it,” Rowberry said. “I’ve got $5,000 in savings, and I’m investing. I never would have imagined being able to do that before.”

She helped her son’s father to join ValleyBuild after he left prison, and he’s now several years into a successful sheet metal apprenticeship. The duo are not a couple, but their careers have helped them to build a strong coparenting relationship, providing their kids access to bigger necessities such as mental health care along with small luxuries like massages or drinks from Dutch Bros Coffee.

“We did it,” Rowberry said. “My daughter stopped and looked at me the other day and she said, ‘Mom, you know what? I am so proud of you. You have come so far.’ Oh my gosh, we cried.”

About the Author

Fiona Kelliher is a freelance journalist who has reported in the U.S. and internationally. Her California reporting for the Mercury News on racial inequalities during the Covid-19 pandemic earned several awards, while her work from Southeast Asia has appeared in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, Nikkei and other publications. She is based in London.

About CalMatters

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