Our Mission:
The Home Builders Association of Ft. Wayne, Inc. supports all segments of the residential building industry through advocacy, education, workforce development, networking and community involvement.
To carry on from last month and our Strategic Plan lets focus specifically on Workforce Development. Membership is always important but illustrating the benefits of membership is key. Let’s take a moment to concentrate on the Workforce Development pillar of our Strategic Plan. Locally, our concentration with Workforce Development is based on several goals.
-
Expand our current scholarship program to include technical schools.
We do have a scholarship fund with the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne that gets awarded to an Ivy Tech student each year. We’d like to further our reach to possibly include scholarships to students outside of Ivy Tech to cover the purchase of tools. -
Member companies to offer co-op or paid internship opportunities.
Many of our members already offer this opportunity to our student chapter members and beyond. The Association is involved with NAHB Student Chapters at Garrett and Anthis Career Center. We also promote the Build Your Future Indiana program that breaks careers in construction down in to “Plan It, Build It, Finish It” categories. The goal of being involved with these programs is to further the reach of opportunities available in the construction industry and bridge the gap of employment needs for our members. -
Establish a Workforce Development committee.
We have a few members that are interested in helping with the Build Your Future Program, doing career fairs and going to speak at our student chapter classes/meetings. If you’re interested in spreading the word to local students, please reach out to Beth. -
Partner with nearby HBA’s to create youth trade programs that connect members with students to share their success.
This goal is still in the works as how to move forward. If you have ideas of how we can implement this goal with other local HBA’s, please reach out to Beth or me. -
Enhance association workforce development efforts and collaboration with local learning institutions.
The HBA is working alongside Junior Achievement in the planning of their JobSpark program. Members are encouraged to participate in this two-day event to help expose thousands of Northeast Indiana 8th graders to careers. If you’re interested in participating in this event or volunteering for other Junior Achievement opportunities, please reach out to Julie Regazzi with JA at julie.regazzi@ja.org.
While having conversations with your network about the HBA, I encourage you to bring up our workforce development efforts. You may be the touchpoint someone needs to become a member or find a purpose within the association.
My goal in showing you this is not only to be held accountable but to show you everything going on if you were not aware. Where do you think you could get plugged in? Maybe it’s just asking one prospective member a month to join and now you have another reason why. If you have a question about something, please feel free to reach out to me and I will do all I can to assist.
Have a great month everyone,
Greg Gerbers
HBA President
Contact Me by phone at (260) 969-1311 or email at greg@dehayes.com