Competitive Employment In Construction

At Employment Connection, we believe everyone has the potential to be self-sufficient. Every program we offer is designed to empower our clients to overcome the often significant barriers they face to employment. We are committed to addressing generational poverty by providing job skills and career training in the booming construction industry to youth from high poverty neighborhoods. 

Our World of Work training is proven to help even justice-involved clients find living wage jobs, and is a nationally-recognized model for re-entry. Our carpentry apprenticeship program provides minority candidates from disinvested neighborhoods with the job skills to necessary to succeed in apprenticeships with our union and construction industry partners. 

With the average age of a worker in the construction industry being 49, the next 20 years will see demand for skilled construction workers skyrocket - and the earning potential will only continue to grow. 

Minority youth from high poverty neighborhoods face significant barriers to escaping poverty. In the predominantly black neighborhoods of North St. Louis City, depopulation and divestment have left whole blocks full of abandoned buildings. From 1970 to 2010, the median census tract lost 39.1% population, while the median poverty rate increased from 14.6% to 20% (St. Louis Federal Reserve). The neighborhoods of steepest decline are in the city's north, and bordering municipalities in north St. Louis County (including Ferguson, MO). Predominantly white and middle class in the 1970's, these neighborhoods are now more than 2/3's black, with an aggregate poverty rate soaring to 27.8% before the COVID pandemic.

Employment Connection has a forty year history of helping clients transcend significant barriers to employment. Originally founded to help ex-offenders find work after serving time, EC has expanded to serve the homeless, veterans, single mothers, at-risk youth, and so forth. 

EC's World of Work program teaches clients about the job search process, pairs them with career counselors, and helps them develop resumes, portfolios, and practice for interviews. 

As an aging construction workforce became a more apparent problem, EC expanded its offerings by partnering with the local Carpenter's Union to provide carpentry training to EC's clients. The City of St. Louis Office of Sustainability, in partnership with the St. Louis Agency on Training and Employment (SLATE) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have also recently announced the launch of a pilot program with EC to train clients from high poverty neighborhoods in photovoltaics and provide them with apprenticeships installing solar panels. 

Scaling up these programs would enable EC to provide our proven job skills course to all youth from historically neglected, high poverty neighborhoods, and allow us to refer interested clients into the high growth construction industry. 

This solution serves youth from high poverty neighborhoods, who otherwise are not likely to find living wage jobs that pay enough for them to escape generational poverty. EC is uniquely positioned, as a provider of wraparound support services (in addition to job skills training, EC provides housing assistance, material assistance, counseling and mental health, etc.), to assist people living in poverty to find living wage jobs, maintain employment, and eventually achieve self-sufficiency. 

By providing carpentry skills to our interested clients, in partnership with the local Carpenter's Union, EC can situate our clients at the entry point to careers in high demand building trades. 

EC works in some of the poorest, high-crime, most neglected neighborhoods of north St. Louis City and County. We have "boots on the ground" in some of the most violent neighborhoods in the entire country through our partnership with Cure Violence. They bring in high-risk clients to go through our World of Work training every day, and our career counselors are able to find them jobs. Longstanding racial injustice in St. Louis continues to hinder their education, employment, and earning potential. But by training clients in high-growth, accessible fields like carpentry, we can position them for success and self-sufficiency.

65 full time staff.

Our board of directors includes multiple former clients of the organization, and we typically hire from within our client population whenever possible. Our leadership team currently includes 1 black man, 1 Asian man, 1 white man, 1 white woman, and 1 black woman, while 5 of our 8 managers are female, and 6 of 8 managers are black.

We deliberately recruit first from the population we serve.

EC's approach is innovative because we start with the belief that every person can achieve self-sufficiency through employment, and build our programs to help our clients overcome the barriers to employment that they face. We don't just provide social services, we provide social services to clients who are working with a career counselor towards building their career. There were 39 agencies in Missouri that received funding from the Department of Corrections as part of their re-entry network. Across the network, the recidivism rate was 17%. EC's recidivism rate led all organizations, and was 3%. 

Heroes work here. Our staff go above and beyond to support their clients - they truly believe that every client who walks in the door has the capacity to be successful, and that it's the agency's job to identify and help remove barriers. We're not engineers, programmers, chemists, or biologists - but our problem isn't one that will be fixed through technology. 

We provide our clients an unconditional belief in their capacity for success.

In 2017, there were 39 agencies in Missouri that received funding from the Department of Corrections as part of their re-entry network. Across the network, the recidivism rate was 17%. EC's recidivism rate led all organizations, and was 3%. 

An unconditional belief in our clients absolutely works.