Non-profit Community Builders helps people on the edge find their way back to employment
The Sudbury man made a series of troubling choices — for years, he struggled with a serious drug addiction, then ended up serving an eight-year sentence for manslaughter stemming from a violent altercation in 2014.
“I met up with Kacey at the library. She didn't care what the problem was, as long as I wanted to work and wanted to succeed.” “It doesn’t pay to be a nice guy in prison; it doesn’t help to get along with people,” he said. “It’s really easy to become institutionalized, to look at the world like it’s us-against-them.”Oag was part of the first cohorts at Community Builders. He said the first few days were a bit of a challenge — smoothing out those rough edges, getting back into a daily routine — as participants are expected to be ready for training every morning by 7:30 a.m.
The group takes on cohorts of people who face barriers to finding work, such as addictions, employment gaps, little formal education — or like Oag, a criminal record — and helps train them for jobs in the construction industry. How it works is this: a contracting group, like Raise The Roof, a non-profit aiming to build more affordable housing, will commit to a new project, like renovating existing units into secondary suites. They contact Community Builders to hire the people needed.