The new community center that will be housed in the old Masonic Lodge in Brownsville will have job training at its heart from the very beginning.
The construction workers helping to renovate the space at 3300 W. Desoto St. will be young adults working on carpentry certifications to prepare them for future careers through nonprofit AMIkids. Once completed, leaders hope it will serve as a community hub that could help with workforce development.
Commissioner Lumon May has been leading the charge to get another community center established in the old lodge, which is next door to the popular Brownsville Community Center. While final designs for the building aren’t complete, May said he envisions a community center space on the bottom floor with a business incubator and “non traditional” library on the second floor, which could help with job training.
“We are training. COVID’s taught us that a lot of the construction (learning) opportunities will be virtual, where people can go online and learn how to frame a building, install metal studs, install flooring. So I mean not just a traditional library, but a hub of training opportunities is what this can be for Brownsville,” May said.
The project has a heavy emphasis on construction because May said the community needed more career exploration beyond just college. Construction specifically also offers an opportunity to be employed immediately after high school and offers a second-chance career for those who have been incarcerated, May said.
“Not every child is geared up to go get a Ph.D. or master’s degree. Being a plumber, electrician, a framer, a dry waller, a carpet installer are noble, honest professions,” May said. “To give children hope, you have to give them a skill.”
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The first young adults to learn construction from the center will be the ones demo-ing the inside of the building. The first two classes of AMI’s new construction certificate program will be working on the project when it gets underway in about a month, depending on weather, said AMIkids Executive Director Cheri Williams.
“That definitely goes into what we do in helping individuals get jobs. And construction is definitely an entrepreneurial division that we need more of. Yes, we need to fill up the jobs for the construction companies that already exist but also to have these individuals have the dream to own their own would be amazing,” Williams said.
AMIkids serves 18- to 24-year-olds and is meant to train youth in vocational skills and help them earn a GED. The new four-month construction program is designed to produce immediately employable job candidates.
Anyone interested in enrolling in the program can apply by calling 850-453-1910 or emailing Pensacola-ed@amikids.org. The program is open enrollment and usually has between 40 and 45 students at a time.
One of those students is 21-year-old Braden Roe. He joined the AMI program to get his GED and will walk away with one OSHA and two carpentry certificates when he graduates from the program this summer.
He said he enjoys working with his hands and was attracted to the program because he believed construction to be a stable career. He will be one of the supervised students helping on the Brownsville project, which he considers valuable experience.
“Well, you know, I still got the teacher there so if I mess up, they can tell me what I’m doing wrong without me just getting kicked off the site,” Roe said.
Because the new community center will be a training project first, May said he didn’t want to put an exact timeline on when it will open but he hoped it would be up and running next summer.
“If we get two, three, four, five young people that get in this project and learn construction and say ‘You know what? I want to own a paint company, my own dry wall company, my own flooring company, my own demo company,’ then we will have accomplished a goal, particularly if we keep young people from going to jail and getting incarcerated,” May said.
Madison Arnold can be reached at marnold@pnj.com and 850-435-8522.
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