Portland YouthBuilders is a nonprofit focused on facilitating careers for young people. The organization offers Oregonians between the ages of about 17-26 support through education and vocational training. We learn more about Portland’s program from Tonia Kovtunovich, the organization’s development director, and Abasi Umoh, a recent participant in the Bridge program.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. A group of Portlanders came together 30 years ago. Their dream was to create a program to help at-risk or low income young people and they succeeded. Portland YouthBuilders started in 1995. Since then, the nonprofit has helped thousands of young people to get education or vocational training for careers in construction and technology. ‘We believe that if we raise the bar for success,’ they say ‘our students will rise to the challenge’. Tonia Kovtunovich is the organization’s development director. Abasi Umoh is a recent graduate from the Bridge program. They both join me now. It’s good to have both of you on the show.
Tonia Kovtunovich: Thank you for having me.
Abasi Umoh: Great to be here.
Miller: Tonia, first. If I popped into your building on some random day, what might I see?
Kovtunovich: You’ve got students in our program. We’re in the Lents neighborhood of Portland, that’s our main building and you’ve got young people in our building every day, 8:00 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon. And we’ve got a classroom. We’ve got a wood shop. We’ve got students in the back learning how to use power tools. We’ve got, what I think people say, what I hear people say a lot when they come in, is that it feels like a community. It feels like home, when you walk in.
Miller: So let’s go back three decades. How did this program start?
Kovtunovich: There was a pretty eclectic group of city of Portland representatives. We had different foundations. We had different construction companies and employers who got together and they heard about YouthBuild funding, which was coming through as a federal line item for the first time and they said we need something like this in Portland. And so this group of 22 different organizations came together and hired someone to write the grant. That became our first Executive Director, Jill Walters, who’s still with us as our E.D. and it basically launched from there.
Miller: Abasi, how did you first hear about YouthBuilders?
Umoh: I had a friend who was living with me at the time who had just signed up and been accepted into the Bridge program and they knew that I was feeling pretty dissatisfied with where I had been working. I had worked in the grocery industry for like seven years. And I just didn’t really feel that there was a lot of growth potential and I had kind of been putting feelers out looking for potential career pivots. And my friend was like, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you’re interested in construction or not but you should check this place out.’ And I did and I’ll admit, I didn’t know if I wanted to fully commit to a career pivot into this industry. I’m Black, I’m queer, I’m non-binary, I’m fat, there’s just a lot of things about my identity that have kind of led me to just never consider making the trades a big part of my life, but I was like, ‘you know what, I’m gonna try it, let’s go for it.’ And that was how I heard about PYB and it was life changing.
Miller: Alright, there’s a lot to dig into here. What do you remember from the first time you went, from your first impressions of the place?
Umoh: Well, I definitely went in with the lens of apprehension due to a lot of the stuff I just mentioned. And within the first week, I think I had gotten my hands on like 10 or so different power tools. I’m talking like big table saws and sawzalls and then just things that I had never even held space for myself to think that I might enjoy or might not enjoy. I don’t know, I just never really thought about it. So the first week, just being able to get a crash course on how all that type of stuff works, I was like, ‘wow, okay, so I do actually enjoy this work and I do want to get into it,’ And that’s that’s what I remember, a lot of about that first week. It was interacting with all of my fellow Bridge students and just that sense of camaraderie and excitement to do the really cool stuff that we were doing, a lot of fond memories that I remember versus the apprehension that I think I first walked in with.
Miller: [Could] any of that apprehension have been right? I mean, were you ever made to feel like you didn’t belong there?
Umoh: Never at PYB. I think that they set really realistic expectations of . . . PYB felt like a very safe space, but I can’t necessarily say that for the trades in general and they never sugarcoated that, which was really helpful, but they also set the expectation of what a really healthy work environment can look like and should look like. And so being able to kind of hold that in one hand and see, ‘wow, like the staff here with all of this incredible knowledge, seem to really be enjoying what they’re doing.’ I’m seeing conflict resolved with open communication and honesty and being able to have that and also understand that when I move outside of this building into the trades, it might not be like that. It really gave me a good understanding of what I do and don’t want to look for as I move forward, pursuing a career.
Miller: Tonia, what does it take for a young person to qualify for your programs?
Kovtunovich: I think the number one thing is motivation. There’s the dry stuff. If you’re going to go into our YouthBuild program and get your high school diploma, which combines vocational training plus academic learning, then you have to have a baseline skill base, in terms of your eighth grade reading level for instance, or an eighth grade math level. But if you’re just coming in, there’s levels around your income level for instance, or where you live, what part of town you live in, that will also help us decide where you come in. But I think the big thing we’re looking for, the qualities that we’re looking for, are the motivation. I want to see a young person who is motivated to make a difference and to do something very different with their lives.
Miller: Motivation that comes from the self, as opposed to say, being pushed into something?
Kovtunovich: Nobody in our program is mandated to be in our program. No one is telling them you have to be here or else X, Y, Z. They’re coming in. We want to see that they are wanting to show up on time, that they’re wanting to work hard, that they’re wanting to go out and get the job that’s going to really launch a career for them. That’s what we’re looking for.
Miller: I want to go back to that line I mentioned earlier which is about expectations and setting the bar high. What do you expect of the young people in your program?
Kovtunovich: A lot of our students who have come into our program, they may have dropped out of high school before they came into PYB and a lot of them drop out because of attendance reasons and so I want them to show up. We were preparing them for jobs primarily in the construction industry. And if you’re going to work in that field you have to show up, you’ve got to be there for your team. And so they need to show up, then you show up on time. They need to show up 15 minutes early. That’s what on time really means for us.
Abasi, you can speak to that for sure, right?
Umoh: Yeah.
Kovtunovich: So if you’re not willing to even just show up and be attentive and play the game, then then you’re not ready for our program.
Miller: Why is this important? And I was remembering a line from President George W. Bush, from one of his speech writers, he talked about the soft bigotry of low expectations. What do high expectations mean to you? And then Abasi, I want to hear what this has been like in practice.
Kovtunovich: A lot of our students come to us without having had the privilege of having positive adult role models in their lives. And many of them have slipped through the cracks in whatever institution they’ve been in, whether it’s been school or whatever, whatever part of their life. There haven’t really been many folks to hold them accountable. We hold our students accountable and I think there is a bit of pride in knowing that you’re doing a job well done. There’s a bit of pride in knowing that someone’s relying on you and they’re counting on you and they care that you show up again the next day and the next day and the next.
Miller: Abasi, as you noted, you had a job before this, but it sounds like it wasn’t a job that you enjoyed that much necessarily or saw much of a future for advancement in working in grocery stores. But I assume that means you were used to being at a place on time. You can’t have a job for seven years if you don’t do that, at least you can’t have most jobs. So these expectations at Portland YouthBuilders, what was new to you about them?
Umoh: Honestly, I was tardy a lot at my old job. I did my job really well, but when it came to showing up on time, that was something that, over the course of seven years, I really let that slide. And so moving into the expectations of this pre-apprenticeship, I remember the very first day, they were very adamant about it. They’re like, we don’t want to have anybody come in and say, ‘oh you didn’t tell us, it’s not fair.’ Like we’re going to tell you to show up on time, do not be late. That’s a huge thing that you have to show that you are ready to do this type of work and at first I was like, ‘oh, I don’t know if I can do that.’ Historically I’ve been pretty tardy. But like Tonia, you said so eloquently, the feelings of pride that you get when you are actually just taking pride in your work and showing up on time, it seems like such a simple thing, but it makes a huge difference in how you start your day. And when I say on time, I mean you better have your gear on and be ready to go five minutes before the program starts.
Miller: Do you think of yourself differently now?
Umoh: Yes. I definitely do. For pretty much as long as I can remember, I’ve had anxiety and depression and struggled with just kind of navigating life, with both of those things, but PYB, going through this apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship has given me a lot of confidence that I didn’t have before. I see myself in a much more capable light. I was at the same job for seven years that I didn’t have a lot of love for because I didn’t see opportunities to go other places. I didn’t think that I could go other places and do other things, do a job where I was actively using my mind or where I developed an expertise in something, right? And going through this pre-apprenticeship, it just showed me so many possibilities that are out there and there are so many places that will hire you, where you can train and learn while you’re getting paid to do that, that I just didn’t feel like I was capable of doing before that I do now. And that has changed the way I interact throughout my life, in all aspects of it.
Miller: Tonia, there’s been a lot of talk in Oregon and around the country over the last two plus years of a youth mental health crisis, one that preceded the pandemic but was definitely made worse by the pandemic. Have you seen this in your work? Have the issues that the young people that your nonprofit is trying to help gotten worse in the last three years?
Kovtunovich: I would say yes. And I would also say that we have been working with a population that has had mental health concerns for the long term. And so our students typically have a higher rate of mental health issues than your standard population does.
Miller: How do you assess the impact of your work? Obviously we’re hearing glowing reviews from Abasi right now, life changing testimonial here. Broadly, population wide, how do you know that what you’re doing is working?
Kovtunovich: There’s the easy stuff to count. There’s the placement rates of getting people into jobs, how long they stay in their jobs, how many diplomas they receive, all those kinds of things. And then there’s the story I hear of a young person who has spent the last two years in mom’s basement and is afraid to come out and just really has that much anxiety that they don’t want to talk to anyone. And they spend six months in our program and they’re out in front of the classroom, leading their group, and they’ve killed it at a job interview and they’re taking strides - that kind of narrative example. We have tons of those. And so there’s a combination, right? There’s the raw numbers and then there’s the stories. That’s how we measure.
Miller: Abasi, what are your hopes or plans for your possible careers now?
Umoh: While I was at PYB, I was able to take a training on an introduction to green building and energy efficiency and that really sparked something inside of me. And so I graduated in September and since then I’ve done two internships now, where I was really able to focus on sustainability and energy efficiency. And now I’m kind of playing around with what I can do with that. I’ve had opportunities to do a lot of home energy scoring and I’ve been able to do a lot of job shadowing and training, but I think now I’m ready to actually move into a career. I’ve been talking with my sibling about some long term plans, about creating our own LLC to do this type of work, to go into homes and retrofit them and make them more sustainable on a very local residential level. So I have so many ideas and so many plans. I’m toying with how I could maybe develop an expertise in electrical work and bring that into the fold. And so honestly, there’s so many opportunities in front of me, I’m struggling to figure out which direction I want to go, which I never thought I would say.
Miller: Just briefly, what goes through your mind now when you go to a grocery store?
Umoh: At least during Christmas time, I’m so grateful, I don’t have to listen to all that music again. Just eight hours of Winter Wonderland is too much.
Miller: Abasi Umoh and Tonia Kovtunovich, thanks very much for joining us.
Umoh: Thank you so much.
Kovtunovich: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: Abasi Umoh is a recent graduate of the Bridge Program, which is a part of Portland YouthBuilders. Tonia Kovtunovich is the development director of the Portland nonprofit.
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