Spring 2025 Colleagues Retreat - Let’s Talk Trades

Preservation Colleagues gathered at the Oneida Community Mansion House.

Retreat recap

The 2025 Colleagues Retreat kicked off with an in-depth tour of the National Historic Landmark Oneida Community Mansion House. We learned about the unique history of the 93,000 square foot site as well as ongoing preservation efforts — a 10-year, multi-phase plan that’s estimated to cost $10 million. Tourgoers learned about the recently completed Phase 1, which involved extensive repairs to the mansard slate roof and masonry walls on the south wing of the complex. We even got a behind-the-scenes look at all the nooks and crannies in the basement!

Click here for a printable version of the Retreat program

Tuesday morning, we got down to business bright and early.

Our goals for the day:

  1. Colleague organizations report out on their trades successes and challenges.

  2. Participants gather valuable "lessons learned" from one another.

  3. Participants learn how they can partner with fellow Colleague organizations to advance the trades.

  4. Participants gain new tools and insights that they can take back to their communities.

  5. Set collective, statewide goals and action items for the preservation trades.

We started off with a review of some key concepts and materials from the Campaign for Historic Trades:

  • 2022 national labor study, Status of Historic Trades in America – This report has good statistics quantifying the demand for historic trades jobs, which can be particularly useful for funding requests.

  • The Campaign has three new Registered Apprenticeship Programs (RAPs) that have been approved by the federal Department of Labor.

    • The approved RAPs are: Deconstruction Technician, Historic Window Technician, and Preservation Carpenter

    • The Campaign will be launching an ambassador program to help recruit participating employers. Local/regional preservation organizations can also plug into the RAPs by establishing pre-apprenticeship programs that can serve as a feeder to a RAP.

    • Recorded info sessions about the RAPs are helpful.

  • The difference between an Apprenticeship and a Pre-Apprenticeship:

  • The Workforce Funnel – Rather than conceptualizing workforce development in the historic trades as a pipeline, the Campaign uses the funnel framework illustrated at right. The message to take away from the funnel: All forms of engagement are valuable and we collectively need to provide education at every level. So, if your organization has the bandwidth to work on just one level of the funnel, that’s ok!

We also provided a quick recap of the League’s 2023 report, Understanding and Advancing the Preservation Trades, completed in collaboration with other northeast statewide organizations. The report’s recommendations fall into six categories:

  1. Building Awareness & Enthusiasm for Trades

  2. Workforce Development & Recruitment

  3. Expanding & Enhancing Educational Pathways

  4. Workforce Retention & Capacity Building

  5. Measuring & Monitoring Success

  6. Recommendations for Future Study & Info Gathering

A key takeaway from the report is that we need to be conducting outreach to youth as early as elementary and middle school. Early outreach can include the top two levels of the workforce funnel: career awareness (such as career fairs and family-friendly events) and interest/engagement (such as summer camps or one-off workshops).

The League is currently partnering with The Landmark Society to raise funds to pilot a classroom trades module that, if funded, would be piloted in schools in the Rochester area. This curriculum and an implementation guide will then be adapted for our Colleagues to use in their respective communities.

PANEL 1: Case Study: Landmark Society’s 2024 Windows Workforce Pilot Program

In an effort to kickstart the next generation of trained professionals in historic window restoration, LSWNY partnered with Flower City Folk and window expert Steve Jordan to provide the Windows Workforce Pilot Training Program in 2024. During the six-week training course, students learned how to restore old and historic windows from start to finish.

Key takeaways:

  • Program organizers were focused on recruiting participants that weren’t homeowners/DIYers and who would eventually go out into the workforce to do window restoration. Zoom or in-person interviews would have been a worthwhile addition to the online application process.

  • Ongoing mentorship from the program instructors, along with peer-to-peer support, has been critical to the program participants who are running their own window restoration businesses.

  • The importance of fostering a sense of community and camaraderie amongst program participants. One way the instructors did this was to pay for and provide lunches on-site so that participants stayed together and had downtime to chat.

  • In this program, students were paid for their time (at $20/hour), which adds a significant expense. It might be worth also exploring a model where program participants pay a fee.

 PANEL 2: Workforce Development + Preservation Trades

Aimee Durfee with CenterStateCEO presented an overview of the framework her organization uses in their approach to workforce development.

Image courtesy CenterState CEO

She noted that talking to job seekers (1.4 in the framework above) is a step that often gets skipped. It’s important to find out what’s attracting them to the field, what their challenges are, what they see as opportunities, etc. Don’t assume that you know.

Key takeaways:

  • The Preservation Trades Center workforce development program is made possible by an ecosystem of program partners including trades unions, employers, and organizations that provide wraparound social services.

  • Prioritization for a trades training program is key. Your priority can be: (1) the people / program participants; (2) the historic site; or (3) the trade itself. PTC intentionally places its priority on serving PTC program participants, many of whom are under-represented in the trades and have been impacted by the justice system. This means that the priority is for program participants to end up in a high-paying job in the construction industry, one that may not necessarily be preservation-related. Organizers hope that participants’ experience at Eastern State sparks an interest in preservation but this is a secondary benefit to providing them with marketable skills and gainful employment.

Next Steps

Take the survey and let us know how we did!

Stay tuned for takeways and action items from the group discussion.