Listen

The ERiCA Grant is dedicated to breaking barriers and creating opportunities for women, non-binary individuals, and underserved populations to build lasting careers in the construction and building trades. This grant provides essential support, including funding for childcare, outreach efforts, and community-building resources, ensuring that historically underrepresented groups have equitable access to these career pathways.

Building off past success, Cerritos College was recently awarded the ERiCA grant for another two years. They wanted to take that as an opportunity to evaluate what was working well and what could be improved.

To serve their current participants – women in the ironworkers and painters apprenticeships – the program team had already established partnerships to offer resources around menstruation equity and wellness. They’d also built a mentorship program that offered a stipend for past program participants to provide guidance and industry support to the new apprentices joining.

As their evaluation partners, our goal was to capture authentic lived experiences of program participants that would reflect the impact of the ERiCA grant and these program resources. We wanted to understand:

• What has been their experience, as women, in the apprenticeship program and working in the trades?
• What support had they received from the program and how might the program improve for the women to follow?

As their storytelling partners, our goal was to showcase the emotion and the realities of experiences from program participants. It was important to tell their stories visually and verbally, which shaped our approach to research design.

Gathering Stories

Knowing that past program participants now had full-time jobs in the trades, we wanted to engage with them in a way that didn’t feel extractive to their day-to-day lives. Luckily, we were able to join a scheduled training for program mentors, led by Wellness Tools for the Trades and featuring period resources from Jess Period.

This gave us the opportunity to add a listening session to time already set aside in their schedules. It also offered a comfortable and informal setting, on the Cerritos College grounds, for us to document their stories in discussion with each other.

Each person mentioned they were regularly the only woman on their job sites. For one person, it took “two years, almost three” to meet another woman in the trades. This gave extra weight to the day and the opportunity to bring together these five mentors to be that representation and support for the women to follow.

Learn

After the in-person session together, we set to work pulling key threads and insights from their stories. We tagged (‘coded’) the transcripts to translate our conversation into organized data and actionable insights.

We tagged quotes that helped to answer our research questions as well as emerging themes. We then grouped those video clips to create high level storyboards, a prototype that would ensure it told a clear story and to identify any gaps in the narrative.

Some strong themes emerged as we reviewed and revisited the conversation. Below are some of the key takeaways:

Make

After reviewing 100 video clips, over an hour of footage, and pulling out key quotes we were able to pull together a clear story in the words of participants.

Upon hearing about the unique way the Continuing Education Division was capturing real-life stories, artifacts and insights, the PR director for the college expressed interest in including vignettes from the videos to share with a wider audience. We drafted detailed content plans, then edited 2 long-form videos and 3 short clips for social media. The videos present a range of topics:

• Reasons women are joining the trades;
• The importance of finding community;
• Barriers women face in a male-dominated industry; and
• The strengths women bring to the trades

To circle back with those who shared their stories, we joined another mentor training and hosted a ‘screening’ of the videos to learn how well the videos reflected their experience and if they were comfortable with how their personal quotes were represented.

To ensure their experience could be used to help future program participants, we compiled our findings and recommendations in a deck-style report. We were already encouraged to see the intentional partnerships and investments that Cerritos College Continuing Education has been able to make with the ERiCA grant. We look forward to seeing how the program continues to make an impact in the coming years!