Alumni
Portland Magazine
February 20, 2019
The founder of Girls Build teaches girls to take on the trades with confidence, spunk, and imagination. Here’s what first inspired her to pick up a hammer.
by Katie Hughes '02
I took my first carpentry job as a way to pay rent and eat food—those new responsibilities afforded a 22-year-old fresh out of college (or, in my case, fresh off my post-college AmeriCorps year with Habitat for Humanity). I saw carpentry as a gig, not a career. My career, I thought, would involve sheltering the shelterless, feeding the foodless, or doing anything befitting a humanitarian poster, the kind of work my social work degree had promised. But in the meantime, I was happy to swing a hammer, finetune my woodworking skills, and learn from a man who quickly became my mentor and friend.
I’d built a good base of houseframing knowledge from my AmeriCorps supervisor, who teased us by saying, “Some bosses are tough and ruthless; I’m just rough and toothless.” Even calling Ray rough was a stretch. He was funny and kind, believed the three women on his crew were equal to the men, and took it in stride when we pointed out the ways we weren’t treated as such. I fell in love with building that year and started on an unexpected career, one that was actually rooted in my childhood. In a way, Girls Build—the nonprofit I eventually founded to teach girls to gain skills and confidence in the trades—grew out of that foundation too.
The first time I used a tool, I was about two or three. My dad, Jim, had died tragically and suddenly at the age of 37 after an on-the-job fall from a telephone pole. I was just a tiny heartbeat in my mom’s womb; just a promise on an undelivered Christmas card, my mom’s surprise gift to him. He had no idea.
What we had of him was a garage full of tools that he had loved and used to build our house and fix our many broken cars and make a cradle and dollhouse and rocking horse and whatever else struck my sisters’ whimsies. These tools were symbols of his love and affection for my sisters and me. He’d held those tools in his hands for hours and hours. Our hands could touch those same spots, hold his tools in the same way, and we could feel a little of what he might have felt as he built for us. It felt, just a tiny bit, like he was there with us.
The first project I remember tackling was our front yard tree fort, complete with a swing and cat elevator. I was three years old. Bridget, four years my senior, was the project manager. She guided my pudgy hands onto the drill, helping me bore holes into a 2x6 for our swing. Then, later, she gave me Daddy’s hammer, our most precious of all his tools, along with a scoop of nails. I nailed up some of the steps that led us precariously into the upper reaches of the tree.
Of the whole fort, though, the cat elevator was the most important piece, precisely because it was the most ridiculous. First, to get this point out of the way, yes, cats have built-in elevators called “claws” that they use daily to climb trees. Apparently, according to us, our cat, Bubbles, needed something fancier—something in the form of two thin ropes thrown over a tree limb with loops at the bottom. We would slide poor Bubbles into said loops, then haul her up into the fort. She hated it, but we thought we were ingenious.
The imagination involved in creating that cat elevator is what I attempt to encourage at our Girls Build summer camps. I want girls to leave feeling like they could go home and build something as ridiculous and unnecessary as a cat elevator. I want them to draw it out on paper, make popsicle stick models of it, fold an origami version, draw it on a whiteboard at school, on the sidewalk in chalk. I want them to be so excited and inspired by a product of their own creativity. I want them to go home and build a freaking cat elevator.
When I started Girls Build in 2016, I did it because there was a need and a request, and I found myself, a decade and a half out of college, uniquely positioned in this world as the perfect person to run a nonprofit that teaches girls to build. This surprised me. I looked over my shoulder at the past 15 years and thought, “Huh. I never realized it was all leading here.”
Our first year, we held two weeks of camp at University of Portland and served 80 girls. This year, in addition to the eight weeks all over the Pacific Northwest, we will hold five weeks of camp on The Bluff; three of them concurrently. We will serve 460 girls during the summer alone. We’ve grown.
Over the course of any given day at camp, girls attend four workshops and use as many tools as we can put into their hands. LeShayla, a camper from our first year, lived with her grandma and had a fantastic experience at camp. She was nine during her first time at camp, loved woodworking and building the playhouse, and really fell in love with the tools. One tool specifically.
“So, apparently I need to buy LeShayla an . . . impact driver?” her grandma asked with hesitation, leaning on her walker, the last moments of the last day of camp unfolding around us. I laughed, picturing LeShayla chatting construction with her grandma over dinner. And she wasn’t the last grandma to come to me with tool questions. Not two weeks ago, I got an email requesting a list. “My granddaughters attended your camp last summer, and for Christmas they want ‘all the tools from Girls Build.’ Can you send me a list?”
It is the ease with which girls learn the lingo and the tools that sticks with me. The first day of camp is a quiet day. The girls seem weighed down by all the tools and safety equipment. Then, truly overnight, they turn into these confident little beings who don’t need help clasping their tool belts or remembering which tool is the speed square. They find they are capable of installing a solar panel (and using the energy to toast a Pop-Tart), soldering copper, pouring concrete, and stopping a 20-foot water main leak. They also realize that they might drive a nail in the wrong spot, cut a board too short, paint something the wrong color, or make 20 other mistakes in a single day—and that the day is not ruined, projects are not broken, life is not over. Essentially, failure is not the end, and soon they brush off mistakes quickly, give each other tips on repairing damage, and they keep moving forward.
On that last day of camp when they are wild and loud and somewhat preposterous as they tour their parents around, I make sure to station myself near the chop saw. The saw is a stationary tool that sits large upon its own stand with a 12" blade. Formally, it’s known as a sliding compound miter saw, but it’s more commonly referred to as a “chop saw.” To operate it, girls must reach up to the handle, hit the trigger, and bring the blade down through the wood. To parental eyes, it can look terrifying. It’s time to show off though, and each girl walks up confidently.
She does all the prerequisite measuring and safety, and finally rests her fingers upon the trigger, ready to cut. It’s at that moment that her parents, who have been clearly holding back, look to her and say, “Are you sure you can use this?” It’s like they waited until the last second, knowing they sent her to camp for this very tool, for this very lesson, and to use all at her fingertips with confidence. They can’t help themselves, even hate themselves for it, but the words escape their mouths almost of their own volition.
Then comes the response.
No matter if she is 10 or 14, she simultaneously huffs and slowly, meticulously, delivers the best eye roll imaginable.
“Of course I can use a chop saw,” she mutters. As if a chop saw is a pencil or tricycle or one of those little cars kids push with their feet. Of course she can use a chop saw. Duh.
She then hits the trigger, her shoulders thrown back in slight defiance, her cut as perfect as I’d cut it. Then she blows off the sawdust with a little extra swagger.
I love that swagger. And I’ve started to think of the eye roll as the Girls Build litmus test.
Did she roll her eyes at her parents for doubting her ability to handle the 12" sliding compound miter saw? Yes?
Mission accomplished.
KATIE HUGHES ’02 won UP’s 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award. Her book Girls Who Build will be out with Black Dog & Levanthal in 2020.
PHOTOS: 1) Katie Huges '02 in the foreground and girls building and painting a playhouse which they donated to Mudbone Grown, a North Portland community farm; 2) Within a day, campers leave their uncertainty behind and grow into confident builders; 3) Girls Build campers making a wind turbine with concentration, know-how, and smiles; 4) Using a chop saw is a highlight of the Girls Build camps.
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