Students from Thurgood Marshall Learning Center, Black Hawk College Adult Ed and Rock Island High School are learning how to rebuild and refurbish homes while creating a safe place for women of domestic violence and women transitioning their lives for better outcomes.
YouthBuild Quad Cities helps teens and young adults serve their community while building future skills. They work with Project Now to refurbish homes while learning skills like carpentry, heating and air conditioning, plumbing, drywall and landscaping. This is a pre-apprentice program and lets participants consider construction as a future career. Students are paid a stipend and work one to three hours a day, four to five days a week.
“The students are learning essential career and life skills, both of which ensure a life with more opportunities,” said Dwight Ford, Executive Director of Project NOW.
YouthBuild Quad Cities Executive Director, Rufus Greer, Jr., said the program benefits everyone; participants learn valuable skills while rehabbing homes for low-to-mid income families. “Our model at YouthBuild is ‘success.’ We define ‘success’ as the progressive realization of a worthy goal. They have to start somewhere…then determine the direction they want to go…and work the plan—be goal oriented.” Some students in the program nationwide have behavior problems or have been impacted by the justice system, Greer said, so the life skills component of the program is popular. School counselors recommend the students who apply for YouthBuild.
YouthBuild is in its 40th year of providing vocational training for anyone aged 16-24 who has not completed their high school diploma or GED. Call (309) 788-0899 or click here for more information on the program.
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