Mohawk College going mobile to tackle trades shortage and poverty

Builder’s $1M donation will help up to 1,200 students train for free

A $1-million donation from Branthaven Homes is helping Mohawk College launch a fiveyear initiative to bring tuitionfree training for residential construction trades to low-income neighbourhoods in Hamilton beginning this September.

“My real motivation for this thing was the social benefit,” Branthaven president Steve Stipsits said following a May 18 ceremony at Mohawk’s Stoney Creek campus to honour his firm’s contribution, which will pay for half of the $2-million effort.

“It’s not for me to fund and get a pipeline for employees,” he said, noting Branthaven doesn’t directly hire tradespeople, leaving that role to subcontractors. “The fact they’re training skilled trades helps everyone.”

The donation expands Mohawk’s City School program, which includes two mobile classrooms that mostly go into neighbourhoods where people are unable or can’t afford to go to the college’s campuses.

Stipsits said there is a “massive shortage” of skilled tradespeople and Ontario will never solve its housing-affordability problem unless it fills that gap because there aren’t the workers to meet the province’s housing targets.

The “amazing” City School program will not only help address the shortage by training up to 1,200 students for free, but help lift them and their families out of the cycle of poverty, benefiting all of society, he said.

“Every carpenter I know who has been working has a home, they have a truck, they can put their kids in sports,” said Stipsits, who served as a Mohawk College governor from 2017 to 2022.

“You can go from being on Ontario Works one year — getting seven, eight hundred dollars a month — to graduating in welding and having a career making close to $100,000 a year,” he said.

“So now you’re a contributing member of the community paying taxes and everything just goes around and around.”

Mohawk president Ron McKerlie said the City School program has trained more than 4,000 students since its 2015 inception, with some going directly into employment and others continuing in college.

“We provide wraparound supports because sometimes people can’t even afford bus fare to get to one of our mobile (classrooms) or they can’t afford the tools for the program, or they might need child care,” he said.

“We realized all those supports had to be available. Some of the students are very complex, in terms of their needs. Others have just had so much discouragement in their life that we had to make sure that if they took the step with us, that they would be successful.”

The City School program has two fixed locations — the top floor of the main library downtown and Eva Rothwell Centre on Wentworth Street North — and the two mobile classrooms, which were funded by Ottawa and the province.

McKerlie said the residential construction program may bring some students to the Stoney Creek Campus for Skilled Trades, where one of the building’s now bears the Branthaven name to recognize its donation.

“We’ve got so much equipment here and so many services available here. It might mean (providing) busing and things like that,” he said. “We’re exploring all those possibilities.”