Giving Compass' Take:

• Women4Women is an initiative that brings together female carpenters building tiny homes for women who are experiencing homelessness.  

• Volunteers from Women4Women are additionally running mentorship programs to train other women who would like to join the construction field. What kind of dynamic does women helping other women bring to this service initiative? 

• To learn more about how to help the homeless population, check out the Giving Compass Homelessness Guide for donors.  

For the volunteer tradeswomen who came together over several cold, wet weekends this spring to build a tiny-house village for homeless women in north Seattle, the ultimate reward wasn’t necessarily their finished handiwork. Rather, it was the confidence and camaraderie the project inspired for many of the crew who, for the first time, worked on a construction site where they were not the only women.

Alice Lockridge, who spent a 30-year career training women to do physically demanding work, created the Women4Women initiative that brought them all together.

Whittier Heights Village is a community of 15 colorful tiny houses, each 100 square feet. In July, its new residents began moving in, many from the streets or from shelters around Seattle. The village also has a common building with a kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry.

Located on city-owned land, it is one of nine tiny-house villages in Seattle that serve as emergency shelters for the city’s homeless population. It is operated by the Low Income Housing Institute, which develops and operates housing for low-income and homeless people in Washington state. Each house costs about $2,500 to build, and the labor is mostly provided by volunteers.

Dozens of women—and also some men—from across the state answered Lockridge’s initial call for volunteers. Not all were carpenters; there also were gardeners, plumbers and electricians, and artists. They included tradespeople with years of experience and folks who hadn’t picked up a hammer in years.

While the construction industry has a narrower gender pay gap than U.S. industries on average, Women4Women volunteer Linda Romanovitch said many women don’t see such work as viable career options.

To remedy this, Romanovitch had assembled about 15 women from Sisters in the Brotherhood, a group of women in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters union who support and mentor one another.

Read the full article about women carpenters by Lornet Turnbull at YES! Magazine