How One Contruction Entrepreneur Is Helping Put Detroit Back to Work

On Community Impact

“We just graduated 20 veterans. Previously, before these guys got into our program they were homeless. They ended up getting jobs. They were really looked down upon on by society, in my opinion because they’re older gentlemen, they’re veterans, they don’t own a home, they’re not working and they were staying in a homeless shelter. Well, we went in there, got the chance to meet some of the guys, interviewed them and we basically put them in the training program with the goal to get them jobs. The one thing that we found out was not only do these guys have hopes and dreams, but also they really had the determination to reach out there and go to work and want to work and continue to contribute to society. We feel that we have a huge impact here on the city because we train people to rebuild and restore Detroit. We want to continue to rebuild the workforce, because the more people that are out working making the city better, the faster the city can turn around and thrive because more people are paying taxes and more people have money to spend at local stores.”

On What’s Next

“We have a number of different training grounds around the city. We have our heavy equipment training grounds on the north end of Detroit. We have out actually training classes at Focus Hope. And we like our partnerships but we want to bring everything under one roof, in house. So we’re working with the city to try and build a state of the art training facility and that is our biggest goal; to create a one-stop destination vocational training school here in the city of Detroit. We’re real excited because we’re bringing a couple big private companies to the table, as far as tool companies, equipment companies, and just work with the city to put this bill together so that we can create a training center that one might see in the suburbs. Instead, this will be in the inner city and accessible to those that are here in the city and can’t make it out into the suburbs where usually there are better resources.

In Detroit we’re seeing a major renaissance where construction and development and buildings being put up everywhere or torn out everywhere and so the goal is to train as many people as possible so that they are working on the new light rail system that’s coming downtown, the new Red Wing arena being built, and different big high end projects where typically before folks in Detroit were excluded from these projects because they didn’t have the skills to work on them. We are training the next generation to take on these jobs so they can make an honest living by doing construction.”

You can learn more about the Detroit Training Center by visiting their website: http://detroittraining.com, Liking their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/DetroitTraining, and by following them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DetroitTraining