ARC Workforce Academy
A registered apprenticeship building electricians and mechanical tradespeople from these blocks — paid on-the-job training instead of tuition debt, and a career at the end of it.
The contractors doing the housing work on these blocks need hands, and the residents of these blocks need careers. The academy is the rail between them: a Registered Apprenticeship Program with paid on-the-job training, funded through workforce dollars instead of out of the student’s pocket.
A registered apprenticeship and craft-training program building electricians and mechanical tradespeople from the neighborhood up — paid on-the-job training rather than tuition debt, funded through workforce dollars instead of out of the student’s pocket.
What is in place today: a Registered Apprenticeship Program, listing on the state’s Eligible Training Provider List, and online related instruction. [Enrollment status, cohort size, and employer partners to be added as they are confirmed.]
The premise is simple. The contractors doing the housing work on these blocks need hands, and the residents on these blocks need careers. The academy is the rail between them.
The country is running short of tradespeople. For a generation, young people were told the only respectable path ran through a four-year degree, and the skilled trades quietly grayed. Now the electricians, plumbers, and mechanical technicians who kept this city’s buildings running are retiring faster than anyone is replacing them, and contractors across the region turn down work for lack of hands — not lack of demand.
A shortage is hard on everyone who needs work done. For the person willing to learn a trade, it is the best kind of news. Wages in the licensed trades keep climbing precisely because skilled hands are scarce; a trade pays a family-supporting wage without a dollar of student debt; and the work cannot be shipped overseas or done by a screen — every building in every city in America needs it, this year and fifty years from now.
And it compounds at home. Every resident who becomes an electrician is a neighbor who can make the aging houses on their own street safe again. Every apprentice paycheck is a wage earned on these blocks that gets spent on these blocks. A neighborhood that holds its own trade skills doesn’t wait for someone else to fix it — it does the work, and it keeps what the work pays.
“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top.”Booker T. Washington, 1895
The academy runs three registered apprenticeship programs today — electrician, plumber, and HVAC/R — each one a nationally recognized credential earned on real jobs at real wages, with concrete trades on the way. An apprentice starts earning the first week and finishes with a credential that travels anywhere in the country.
Short-cycle credential programs in the trades, paired with employers who commit to interviewing and hiring neighborhood residents — because an apprenticeship only works if there is a paycheck on the other end of it.
The academy’s classroom is the neighborhood itself. Apprentices earn their hours on the repair crews of our Critical Repair Program and on the small projects of our Infill Development initiative — and the ones who want more than a wage have a path past it: journeyman, then contractor, then builder of the lot down the street. A neighborhood that trains its own trades ends up owning its own rebuilding.
New homes on the vacant lots between the homes that never left — small buildings, built steadily, by builders from these blocks — so the neighborhood fills back in without being torn down and started over.
Learn MoreHealth-and-safety repairs — roofing, electrical, plumbing, heating and cooling, structural — that keep a legacy homeowner in the house they already own, instead of losing it one leak at a time.
Learn MoreThe everyday gathering places between home and work — storefronts, fellowship halls, corner groceries — restored across seven neighborhoods, anchored by the district at 12th Avenue North and Carraway Boulevard.
Learn MoreSmall-business financing for Northside residents — so the investment coming to these blocks is owned by the people who live on them.
Learn MoreCome work a Saturday. Homeowner repair crews, vacant lot clean-ups, and tutoring all run on volunteer hours.
Volunteer TodayCongregations, businesses, and organizations carry this plan together. If yours wants a lane, there is one open.
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