BCBusiness

September 2019 - Women's Work

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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28 BCBUSINESS JULY/AUGUST 2019 If you look up at the second-floor walkway, with its metal bannister skirting a succession of tall, narrow doors, it's sud- denly clear that this was once a jail. But rather than guards and inmates, about a dozen tradespeople occupy the space. Dressed in steel-toe boots, work pants and T-shirts, with bulky tool pouches slung around their hips, they pound and drill, creating a buzzing, discordant symphony to a remarkable metamorphosis. On the ground floor of the stripped-down interior, a living room with an enormous fireplace is taking shape while a former guards' area is being reborn as a games zone. With help from more than 500 volunteers and 120 businesses, this building near downtown Victoria, previously the Juvenile Detention Facil- ity, is being transformed into a peer-to-peer recovery centre. Renamed Our Place Therapeutic Recovery Community, it will offer a voluntary two-year, community-based program for 50 men who have suffered trauma, addiction or homelessness or who aspire to a new life after incarceration. There's another metamorphosis going on here. Like most construction sites, Our Place hosts young, inexperienced workers getting hands-on train- ing. But in contrast to similar locales, all 25 of them are women, students from the 12-week, female-only Trade Skills Foundation program offered by Victoria's Camosun College. 28 BCBUSINESS SEPTEMBER 2019 ON POINT When electrician Sandra Brynjolfson started in the trades 20 years ago, women on the job were a rare sight

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