In 2019, Alexis Rowberry was living in a Fresno County homeless shelter with her two kids, recently out of what she described as an abusive relationship. “We had nothing,” she said. She found herself at the Fresno County Department of Social Services, staring at a flier.
“They had something up on the wall about trades,” said Rowberry, now 40. “It wasn’t there the day before, and it wasn’t there the day after. It just happened to be there that day.
And I told my [social] worker that I wanted to do this program.” She tried signing up, but she was denied — against policy, she later discovered — because she was a single mother without housing. In desperation, she contacted the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union, where a sympathetic secretary helped connect her with an alternative: ValleyBuild, a pre-apprenticeship program that prepares Californians for careers in the skilled trades.
“That six weeks — it was only six weeks, but it changed my life,” said Rowberry, who has been working as an electrician since graduating the program in late 2019. “It changed my life.” Related Story: ValleyBuild: A Path to Economic Opportunity ValleyBuild was born out of the Fresno Regional Workforce Development Board in 2011 with the goal of helping economically disadvantaged Californians, including women and people who have had contact with the criminal justice system, enter the state’s growing trades industry and potentially reach the middle class.
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