Local heroes

April 18, 2007 7:23:48 PM

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Andrew Cortes

ANDREW CORTES
The power of opportunity
As a one-time high school dropout who found a better life through an apprenticeship and the chance to learn carpentry, Andrew Cortes knows first-hand about the difference that an opportunity can make.

It seems poetic, then, that after the California native settled in Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood he set to work in helping other young people to raise their own prospects.

Coming to Rhode Island about seven years ago with his former wife, Cortes initially pursued his trade as a union carpenter, working on the Providence Place Mall and other projects. At the same time, as someone with a strong streak of social activism, he felt the need for work that would more fully incorporate his personal beliefs.

As fate had it, YouthBuild Providence, part of a national effort that teaches carpentry skills to high school dropouts, was looking for a construction manager. Initially drafted by political activist Matthew Jerzyk (an occasional Phoenix contributor) to help find applicants for the post, Cortes wound up taking the job himself, and he became director of the program one year later.

While YouthBuild Providence, based in a building on Delaine Street in Olneyville, has made a significant difference in the lives of many of its participants, Cortes is excited how a new initiative, Building Futures, has the potential to reach a larger number of people. This is true because YouthBuild is an intensive 10-month program, targeted to dropouts 16 to 24, which includes copious amounts of education and a 900-hour service commitment. Building Futures, by contrast, is a simpler effort to link unemployed or under-employed men and women in Providence’s low-income neighborhoods with union apprenticeships.

This is a potentially fruitful vein. As the Providence Plan, one of the main partners in the project points out on its Web site ( www.providenceplan.org), “Jobs for skilled workers in the state’s construction industry are expected to grow by 24 percent in the next five years, a statistic that translates into 2000 new jobs each year. Meanwhile, approximately 18 percent of the industry’s current workers are over the age of 50. These figures concern not only contractors and developers, but also the building trade unions.”

A pilot effort for Building Futures, targeting about 30 individuals, is slated to start within roughly the next month.

Besides YouthBuild Providence and the Providence Plan, the other main partners are Building RI, and Making Connections Providence. The effort, along with YouthBuild, and the Olneyville Housing Corporation will eventually be housed in the Polish National Home, just a stone’s throw from YouthBuild’s current home. The now-vacant Polish National Home will be refurbished with help from YouthBuild apprentices, as well as considerable funding from Rhode Island’s Associated General Contractors and developer Struever Brothers Eccles & Rouse.

Cortes, 33, works from a spare office equipped with a laptop and decorated with posters in the style of Olneyville’s creative underground, as well as his journeyman’s certificate from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.

As Northeast states like Rhode Island continue to lose the manufacturing jobs that enabled blue-collar workers to earn a good livelihood, Cortes believes a lack of awareness, along with the various hurdles faced by poor residents, explains why more people haven’t sought construction jobs on their own.

Cortes, who lives in Olneyville, also serves on Providence’s City Plan Commission and has volunteered on various other boards. As such, he has had a front row seat for many of the tense debates about development and gentrification in Olneyville and other old industrial neighborhoods.

He points to the different parties involved in reviving the Polish National Home as an example of how overlapping interests can come together for the common good. The key, Cortes says, is finding those areas of agreement and spreading them outward. “Do I think it can be expanded outward?” he asks. “Absolutely.”

At the same time, Cortes keeps a simple motivation in mind while pursuing his work. “Big impacts are great,” he says, “but those impacts break down to an individual’s life . . . Without that, I wouldn’t be interested.”

_Ian Donnis

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