Jove Nazatul, cabinet maker, and Cass Galbraith, carpenter and welder, have facilitated one session of workshops together, with two more sessions scheduled in September and November. Details for these virtual sessions are available here.
Created intentionally in consultation with tradespeople, the We Are Trades curriculum has “a very authentic, very real experience behind it,” says Jove. The workshops provide employers with actionable steps to establish a safe and inclusive workplace, helping to improve recruitment and retention. Developed in 2021, the framework and workshops recently underwent an inclusive language review.
While the workshops have a set curriculum that Jove and Cass cover, additional learning takes place in the questions and conversations during the sessions. The facilitators have found this creates a sense of community amongst attendees.
“It’s definitely crucial that these workshops are taught by tradespeople because there’s a certain connection that we make with other tradespeople that non-tradespeople will not have with them,” says Cass. “They understand the amount of discipline that we have to go through, they understand the analogies. We share this respect for the work ethic. And just being able to relate to each other makes it that much more comfortable and easier to communicate.”
“It signals a shift forward in how we view EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) work within the skilled trades,” says Jove. “We are valuing people’s experiences, people who used to be in the trades or who still work in the trades, and we’re valuing that experience and platforming that.”
This shared experience allows for important conversations, sometimes finding solutions to problems raised by participants before the workshops are even over.
“[You can have] those real conversations: ‘you say creating a business case is important, I’m having pushback through my company, how can I still do this work?’ And then we have a few people in the room problem solving and saying, ‘no, don’t take no for an answer,’” says Jove. “Sometimes you just need to be in a room with people whose values align with yours to feel galvanized in the work that you’re doing.”
To be more inclusive in EDI work, recent updates to We Are Trades include updating the tagline to creating psychologically safe workplaces for everyone — recognizing the need to include more voices in these conversations.
“We really need to include more men; we also need to include the voices of gender-diverse folks like myself,” says Jove. “I think there’s been a lot of intention in picking [tradespeople as] facilitators — but also tradespeople with intersections. We have a depth of perspective and experience that I think lends itself to making this workshop hit differently for different people.”
Jove and Cass say recent attendees come to the workshops engaged and ready to share their learnings when they go back to work.
“They’re very eager to learn, and I think that the We Are Trades Workshop gives them a scaffolding on which they can build their own EDI initiative within their own organizations,” Jove says. “People have come with this open-mind approach to learning, and some of the conversations that we get have been very helpful and very useful for everyone.
“It’s a very easy goal. We lay it all out for you. If more people were to bring this back to their organizations, we could create some change in the skilled trades industries.”
