Birmingham’s BuildUP awarded $3 million to expand skilled trades for high school students
BuildUP Community School in Birmingham will use a major national grant to expand programs that prepare high school youth for skilled trade careers and homeownership. Enterprise Community Partners and The Wells Fargo Foundation named BuildUP one of the six winners of the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge (HABC), a nationwide competition to find and seed innovative housing solutions across the U.S. The workforce-development-focused high school was awarded $3 million in the competition. In addition to receiving grants ranging from $2 million to $3 million each, the six winning organizations will receive support from peers and industry experts to scale new strategies aimed at making homes more accessible. Founded in 2018 in the Ensley neighborhood of Birmingham, BuildUP deploys a workforce-development model that offers low-income youth career-ready skills through paid internships and industry-aligned secondary and early post-secondary coursework. Students who complete the program emerge with the education and credentials needed to secure well-paid positions in the housing and construction trades, with an opportunity to become homeowners and leaders in their communities. The three-year grant will help BuildUP expand to new sites in Alabama and beyond by hiring additional staff and expand its house donation/relocation program, in which houses are secured, relocated, and renovated with the help of BuildUP students. The expansion will be spearheaded by BuildUP founder Mark Martin. “We get calls almost weekly from people asking us to bring BuildUP to their communities,” said Martin. “We always saw the need for expansion, and Enterprise and Wells Fargo have now helped open the door to that opportunity.” HABC funds will also be used to support the flagship high school, BuildUP Community School, in Birmingham’s Titusville community, led by Executive Director James Sutton. Sutton’s goal is to continue to grow the school’s enrollment with students who desire high-wage, high-demand jobs in the trades and want to become homeowners. “Winning the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge puts us into a pool of like-minded people who are doing great work – people we can continue to grow with and lean on for support,” Sutton said. “It also means we can see more of our students become homeowners and literally change the trajectory of their lives.” The Alabama Power Foundation is among BuildUP’s supporters. The HABC competition drew more than 400 applicants from a wide range of innovative nonprofit and mission-driven for-profit organizations stretching from Florida to Alaska. The applicants competed in three categories: access and resident support; construction; and financing. BuildUP won in the access and resident support category. After two application rounds, 16 finalists were invited to present their innovations in a 10-minute pitch to a panel of judges composed of national affordable housing and community development experts, including leaders from Wells Fargo and Enterprise. The other grant winners are: California-based Grounded Solutions Network; Hope Enterprise Corp., based in Jackson, Mississippi; Hydronic Shell Technologies, based in New York; Pittsburgh-based Module; and Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority in Juneau, Alaska. The 2023 winners will take part in a multiyear, peer-learning network to share ideas and cultivate their innovations into solutions that can be applied to communities across the U.S. The cohort will gain access to a network of leaders from across the housing sector, including experts from Enterprise and past winners of the competition. For more information about the competition, the winners, and their proposals, visit the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge website. A version of this story originally appeared in The Birmingham Times. Republished with the permission of The Alabama NewsCenter.
