A New Word for “Boots on Ground”
Date Posted: July 16, 2014
Posted In: Ideas, News,
by Tom Finan, Executive Director, Construction Forum St. Louis
In Swahili the word “Harambee” means “let’s pull together.” But ask David Mastin and he’ll suggest that in St. Louis Harambee translates as “boots on the ground”.
Henning, left, and Mastin
Mastin, president of St. Louis Design Alliance, read a recent article in this newsletter about the Building Union Diversity (BUD) program being developed by the Building Trades Council and the Carpenters District Council. He praised that effort and suggested that there’s a program that’s been taking a grass roots approach to diversity in the construction trades for over a decade.
That lead us to the rear of an apartment building on Westgate near the Delmar Loop, where Mastin introduced us to Aaron Henning, the executive director of Harambee Tuckpointing. Harambee is an outreach effort of the New City Fellowship, a PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) church with sites in University City and South St. Louis. New City was formed in 1992 to serve an intentionally diverse community in University City and Hamilton Heights in the city of St. Louis. Mastin is an elder at New City.
On Westgate, Harambee is currently serving as a subcontractor to Altman-Charter Company, which is renovating the building for Quandrangle Housing, the off-campus housing arm of Washington University in St. Louis. The crew at the rear of the building was rebuilding a wall that was unsalvageable.
Quadrangle owns and manages thousands of units in the University City/City of St. Louis neighborhoods surrounding the Washington University Campus. Mastin pointed out work that Harambee had performed on at least half a dozen buildings in the Westgate neighborhood.
Henning explained that when he began a youth program in 1996 as an outreach of the church. “I discovered that most of the teenage boys came from single-family households. Their outlook was that the only industry activity was drug- and gang-related. The gangs provided a family structure and they provided commerce.
Mastin with some Westgate units tuckpointed by Harambee .
“What we found out pretty quickly was that offering an opportunity to do something different (appealed to the boys). We were overwhelmed with the number of kids who wanted to participate.”
Some of the young men in the program suggested helping elderly residents in the Heights area by doing home repair and renovation. After a number of years of doing that work, the group began developing training techniques for performing tuckpointing work by working on vacant buildings being developed for a not-for profit. Asked what made it finally click they acknowledged, “We did a lot of praying.”
At the core of the Harambee training approach is intense peer pressure. The more-experienced young men in the program mentor and keep the fledgling workers in line. Harambee’s leadership spends an inordinate amount of time one-on-one with its workers. The program has five staff members for a crew that currently sits at 14.
“It’s very intensive interaction and acknowledging that traditional training methods don’t work,” Henning said. He noted that even some of the area’s top MBE firms “blow through people” because the young minority workers don’t have the applied work ethic to make it.
Everything from safety, to the math of construction to showing up on time and working in hot St. Louis summers is addressed by Harambee. Tough love rules apply: When the program intensified its drug monitoring, some of the young men, “decided they would rather stay home and smoke dope than work,” Henning said.
What really makes the training stick, he said, is the support and pressure from older participants in the program. The foreman at the Westgate project is Tracy, who started with Harambee when he was 14. He spends a lot of his time both training and acting like a big brother to the younger workers.
Veneer wall built by Harambee on Westgate.
Tracy has support of his own. Mastin was scheduled to meet with him the day of the tour for lunch to talk about life. Mastin said that several members of the Harambee board participate in the one-on-one mentoring. Harambee has also been the recipient of generous advice from respected individuals in the construction community like HBD’s President Mike Perry and Frank Haase, senior vice president at E.M.Harris.
Both Mastin and Henning acknowledge that the “business model” for Harambee doesn’t work in the for-profit world. Residential tuckpointing (they are only insured to three stories) is a niche which doesn’t make sense for larger contractors.
Which is not to say that Harambee and its workers don’t recognize the seriousness of the task at hand. “There’s a ton of work being done here and Harambee only has so much capacity,” Mastin said.”The GCs face liquidated damages. Quandrangle’s got to have their units or they don’t have anyone living in there for nine months.”
Walking up and down Westgate looking at thousands of brick tuckpointed or laid by Harambee crews, it is obvious that what is being built and repaired is much more than masonry walls. These young men are “pulling together” to build a better future for themselves and for their peers.