Hello, people -- I'm reading (lurking, for a while) and am enjoying especially
the stuff from Brazil from Ricardo.
Just wanted to quickly let people know that the Building Bridges project (little
math classes, 11 weeks once a week, at church sites in Chicago, intended to
prepare minorities and women -- especially -- to apply to union apprenticeship
buiding trades programs) is chugging along. We still have the site at St. John's
in Joliet (although exactly who will pay the teacher there is up in the air);
Friendship Baptist Church on the west side is coming through with a site, soon to
get started; on the south side, St. Kevin's is hosting a class, and St.
Elizabeth's on the near south side (Washington Park area) is going to pay a
teacher. So it's still cranking along.
The Carpenters union (UBC) put in $10,000 to the Interfaith Committee on Worker
Issues to support the program (this goes into overhead and general payroll, but
not the teachers themselves) and is still hosting our advisory board meetings at
one of their in-city apprenticeship training sites. I've given the ISCRAT
abstract book to the Carpenters apprenticeship program director (actually, he's
director of community relations right now) -- a really cool guy named John
Drozdek, to see what he thinks of the whole thing.
Also, we've connected with the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and
Education (CLRE) to put together a little conference next March 2003 drawing
community-apprenticeship-union collaborations from across the country to get
together for one day to try to figure out what we have in common. Most of these
collaborations come in the form of Project Labor Agreements (PLA's) between state
or municipal governmental agencies (Port Authorities, cities, etc) and unions;
ours involving community based organiziations is a bit differernt.
The Carpenters might be very well justified in asking, "All this conference stuff
is nice and fancy, but does it help get good minorities and women into
apprenticeship programs?" They could very well ask me this question directly, at
our next advisory committee meeting.
So things are chugging along, just below the horizon of Big Bucks, but still
happening.
I'll be off email for 2 weeks but will catch up when I get back. Thanks to
everyone --
Helena Worthen
Chicago Labor Education Program
University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
312-996-2623
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