Kirk: Welcome back to Talk the TAUC, the podcast from The Association of Union Constructors. I’m your host, Kirk Westwood. On this show, we talk about leaders from across labor, management, and industry who are shaping the future of union construction.
Today, I’m excited to welcome Angie Simon, executive director and co-founder of the Heavy Metal Summer Experience. Angie spent 35 years at a union mechanical contractor, serving as president for 14 of those years. From 2019 to 2021, she was the national president of SMACNA. Through those experiences, she saw firsthand the workforce challenges facing our industry, and she decided to do something about it. That’s where the idea for Heavy Metal Summer Experience was born.
Angie, welcome to Talk the TAUC.
Angie: Oh, I really appreciate the offer. I’m excited to talk about Heavy Metal Summer Experience.
Kirk: One of the things that I like to do at the beginning of everything, just to get me to know you a little bit better, is what’s the last song you got stuck in your head?
Angie: Well, I’m a big Earth, Wind & Fire fan, and I was actually just listening to September on Earth, Wind & Fire. So any Earth, Wind & Fire song is always stuck in my head.
Kirk: I will say that there have been many a moment that I’ve had September stuck in my head. That is a good song to have stuck in your head.
Angie: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Kirk: Let’s start with your career. You spent 35 years with a union mechanical contractor, and led both your company and SMACNA at the national level. What did you see in those roles that made you realize our industry needed to take action?
Angie: I started at Western Allied Mechanical one year out of college and just grew up there, eventually became a partner and then our president, so 2008 I became president.
As I was going through the chairs also with National SMACNA, everywhere I went, every contractor I talked to, and even in my own shop, I realized that my trade folks, particularly my trade folks, but even our office folks were all getting to the point where we were going to see a lot of retirements coming up. As it was, I was also on the end of the baby boomers and a lot of us baby boomers are going to be retiring soon.
When I became SMACNA National President in 2019 but then the pandemic hit, I would virtually visit contractors across the nation as well as running my company. That’s where I really heard them all talk about, what are we going to do over the next 10 years when all of our trades people retire? They kept saying, we need to get more people in the trades, but they kept talking about it but not doing anything about it.
That’s when, during the pandemic, I actually cornered my partners and I said, hey, I think we should run a summer camp and we should work with East Palo Alto. I’m in northern California and it’s an underserved area right next to our shop that we’ve worked with for years. I said, let’s see if we can work with the high schools in East Palo Alto, run a summer camp, teach them about the trades, and see if we can get them to understand what an amazing career the traits could be. That’s what I decided to do. We planned it and everything, and ran it in 2021.
Kirk: That’s awesome. I’ve talked to a lot of people throughout my tenure here and others about recruiting. We talk about how we get these people and those people, and how we get people to understand this. I was like, we need to make it aspirational. We need to get kids in middle and high school to understand that this isn’t a fallback plan. This is a great career. This is a thing that you can do and be excited about.
Angie: And the parents need to understand that too, because I think part of our bigger challenge is parents and counselors to a certain degree. The other thing for the kids, you can’t just tell them about it. They actually need hands-on. When these kids start to learn how to bend metal, solder, and weld, oh my gosh, they love fire. Kids at the high school age. We learned that really quickly.
That helped change their perspective, like, wow, this is actually really cool stuff. Then they started hearing how much money they could make and what a great career it could be. The light in their eyes really comes on, that reward side of it, when you start seeing those kids and how excited they are.
Then when the parents get all our information about what an amazing career a union sheet metal worker, or a union pipe fitter, or a union electrician can be, how much they could make, and how many people we need in the industry right now and in the next 5–10 years when all the other ones retire, it really does. The hands-on part of our camp, the 30–40 hours of hands-on is a really important step in teaching these kids.
Kirk: There’s something really special. At any age, frankly, when suddenly you realize you don’t have to always buy it, sometimes you can build it, like I can do this. I can make this. I can turn steel into that shape I want. I don’t have to go on Amazon or wherever and find it. I can make it. And that’s a very important moment.
Angie: It also builds a lot of confidence. A lot of the parents, the surveys we get from them say, the first day, the second day, our student would come home and actually tell me what they did, because they say most of the time they never talk about what they do during the day. But then, on the second day and the third day, the parents say their confidence level builds so much about what they do.
So yeah, I think building something on your own, using your hands, learning what to do, their confidence level just gets so high, and I love seeing that. By the end, they’re very, very proud of what they’ve done.
Kirk: Absolutely. You built this new thing, Heavy Metal Summer Experience, in 2021. Walk me through that. How did it come together? What was the experience like for you and the students?
Angie: We had decided to do this late part of the summer in 2020. I put a business plan together and shared the idea with my partners, and they said, yeah. To their credit, which I showed it was going to cost us some money, but they said, let’s do it. I actually shared that vision that I was going to do this in the workforce.
Well, 2020 all of us, we were doing Teams, virtual conventions. SMACNA’s convention was virtual and I was the SMACNA president, but I attended a workforce roundtable virtually and shared the idea that I’m going to run this camp. I immediately got a call from a very good friend of mine, Rick Hermanson up in Seattle. He said, Hermanson company wants to run that camp with you. Can we work together?
The two of us together worked with our support, with our shop superintendents, coming up with projects, what do we want to make, what do we need. We need permission slips. We need schedules. How are we going to do this? How many hours? We just created it and we picked a name, a fun name, Heavy Metal Summer Experience.
We planned what we were going to do. We wrote a little playbook about how we’re going to do this camp. I’ll tell you, it was amazing that first year. We had a total of 28 kids—16 in Menlo Park and they had 12 outside of Seattle.
We had a couple of things that we didn’t expect. The employees of our company loved it. They love giving back. They got to see these kids and see how excited the kids were. They got to attend the graduation, see all the parents and how excited they were. Our employees just loved doing the camp. That was a side benefit (I think) that Western Allied didn’t really expect.
Then at Hermanson’s graduation, a mom pulled us aside and said, can I talk to you? I said, sure. She said, I’m a housekeeper and my husband’s a framer. Our daughter, in her last semester of senior year, was in a really dark place. She didn’t want to go to college. She knew she couldn’t do well in college, but she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life.
The mom started crying. She said, I lost my daughter. She goes, now, six weeks later, since she’s been in your camp, I have my daughter back and I have you guys to thank for that. That young lady should be turning out as a journey person in February or March.
It still gives me goosebumps because that’s one of our first graduates. She got into the trades within six months of our camping done, and now she’s going to be turning out. That hooked me. At that point I’m like, wow, this does work, and we have to tell people about this.
Kirk: That is incredible. I don’t want to take us off-track here, but I’m curious. 2020, the world was shut down, and no one was going outside. Did that prove any mental or physical impediment to getting off the ground setting this up during a pandemic?
Angie: I think the team coordination with Hermanson and Western Allied using Teams and using virtual was actually very convenient. We had learned to use Teams because of that then.
In the camp in 2021, everybody wore masks. We were still following protocols. The kids had to wear masks and that was a pain. But at that point, we in construction adapted pretty fast with the pandemic. We put our safety protocols in place. It actually was probably a nice distraction trying to plan the camp in 2020 because it felt like we were trying to do something good. We needed something good in our lives in 2020.
Kirk: Everyone needed some good news in 2020. It was a bleak year. It is incredible how quickly this experience has scaled, 28 students that first year in 2 shops, to 51 camps across the United States and Canada with about 800 students in just under 5 years. How did that happen?
Angie: I’m very proud of it, but I’m also in awe of it. I was a two-year term national SMACNA president because of the pandemic. They had me stay on through the end of 2021. Then in 2022 as past president, I also did a lot of traveling and talking. I started sharing the story of the camp as soon as it was done.
It was really sharing it and listening to contractors talk about their concerns, but actually challenging the contractors because I’m like, guys, I’m tired of you thinking the union’s going to solve our problem. How about we get some skin in the game? How about we do something about it? Run a summer camp. Work with the union to run a summer camp, then you’re going to find some that you can get some kids.
We must have hit a nerve because the amount of companies that started volunteering to do it, if anything, for me it was a little overwhelming how quickly we grew. We created a monster, however, we have amazing partners—Milwaukee Tool and DeWalt.
Every kid, when they start the camp, they get a set of boots. That’s what Heavy Metal Summer Experience fundraiser’s for. For the last few years, we’ve been using Red Wing. They show up with their vans and the kids get to have boots. When they graduate camp they get a beautiful stainless steel medal that we have made. But they also get a bag of tools. DeWalt and Milwaukee have been amazing partners, and they donate those tools for us.
I got a little nervous as we kept getting bigger and bigger because I’m like, wow, Are they going to keep giving us all those tools? They’re currently on my board and they’re saying that they love what we’re doing, so they’re going to continue to help us. We have reached out to a lot of partners, and that’s the one thing for me is learning to run a nonprofit was a whole new world for me.
Kirk: Absolutely. We have close friends at both Milwaukee and DeWalt, and I’ll tell you that they love things like this, giving back, as well as supporting that next generation. I bet they are just delighted.
You talked a little bit about the parent. Can you share that same story, but from one of your camper’s experiences? A testimonial of things you’ve seen campers go through?
Angie: It was really neat, actually. The summer of 2024, we had a [...] number of camps, but there was a story I heard. There was a young lady at the camp in Rhode Island. Did the camp. She was a very outgoing young lady. Actually my brother helped attend that graduation.
My brother lives back east in New Hampshire, so I had talked him into, hey, could you cover a couple of graduations for me? He and his wife went and they were filming it. She was super excited. She loved what was going on. She loved the camp so much. She felt so accepted by Unique Metals, the contractor in Rhode Island.
Immediately, she had just graduated high school and she actually talked to Unique Metals. How can I get in? Can I work for you? And they said, we want to hire you right now, so they hired her. She’d been working for them for this whole last year. She came back to the camp this summer, and she spoke to the kids that were graduating this summer.
It’s wonderful to hear a kid who never even heard of it until she went to the camp. Now, she’s been working for them for a year and she was just the champion of it. She loved talking about it. She said, the field’s amazing. She goes, you don’t just work in the shop. You can go in the field. You get to build things. We are getting a lot of kids that are alumni (I should say) that are willing to talk about their experiences. It’s been pretty neat.
Kirk: That’s awesome. You mentioned Unique Metals. I wanted to talk a little bit about these contractors that play hosts to these. How are you seeing the contractors set up to run these programs? You just told a great story, but what impact is it having on that pipeline for the contractors in the workforce?
Angie: The first year (particularly) is a lot of work. Not going to shy away from that after the first because you have to recruit the kids. That’s probably the area where contractors probably have to go to the high schools, talk to somebody. It’s a little bit of a challenge.
After the first year in regards to recruiting, once the kids hear about it and once they go back to high school and tell people about it, recruiting becomes much less challenging. But the first year you do have to set up your plan. You make your schedule. You decide how you’re going to run it.
We’re pretty open at Heavy Metal to allow them to make their schedule. Some camps want to do it all in one week and get it done. Some of them want to do it from 1:00 to 5:00 and do it two weeks in a row from Monday through Friday. But some of them even just do it from 2:30 to 5:00, and they do it for six weeks.
It just depends on their schedule because a lot of them are working shops and they’re not big enough to have it during the day. And the contractors are paying money for that too, because oftentimes they’re paying their union employees if they’re working during the day.
Also, a lot of times we’ve encouraged them to fundraise from their supporters and vendors, and see if they can get a lunch sponsored or that type of thing. We have what we call a playbook, and it’s part of the resources that Heavy Metal provides. They sign up (we call it) the easy button, and we have sample everything—sample schedules, we have sample graduation certificates. We try to make it as easy as possible. Honestly, we get some great compliments because a lot of the camps the first year go, oh my gosh, these resources are amazing.
We also assign any new camp a liaison. Now I’m just getting my third, but we have three retired guys from the industry who have volunteered to be liaisons. They start calling the camps early in January and, how can we help? What questions do you have?
I think part of it is we have so much in the resources that I don’t think they even know how to get through it all. The liaison can walk them through, okay, let’s talk about this and let’s do that. Then the liaisons will help attend graduation.
We encourage the camps to make graduation quite the celebration. I know at Western Allied, we always had a company lunch. We’d have 150 people come for free food as of course everybody comes. But it’s really neat for the kids to be able to have 150 people attend their graduation.
Kirk: That is incredible. I want to actually go back to your playbook. For those that might not know, including myself, walk me through the—I don’t know if this is the right word—curriculum. Whether it’s one week or two or the six week program, what are these kids doing for the time they’re there?
Angie: The ideal situation is we run full MEP—mechanical, electrical, and plumbing/piping. But sometimes we don’t. I’m actually running them in a lot of training centers as well. Our first all-electrical camp was in an IBEW training center. We run them in a lot of smart training centers.
My ideal situation would be like what we did in Nashville last year, which was we actually ran a camp through the Tennessee Titans Building Alliance. They were building their new stadium and Turner Construction’s working on it. The first day was at the job site and they did safety training. They did a little bit of carpentry training there. Then day two was at the sheet metal training center. Day three was at the piping training center. Day four was at the electrical training center. And day five was a massive job site tour of the Tennessee Titan Stadium.
What they’re doing is they’re building (let’s say) sheet metal. They’re going to go in there. Most of the time they build a sheet metal toolbox. They learn to bend metal, they learn to rivet, they learn to solder. They might do some welding in the sheet metal side as well on metal. Then piping-wise, they’re going to make different projects.
We have a lot of projects that the contractors are doing where the piping gets soldered. You have sheet metal, expanded metal. You’ve got to cut and you’ve got wiring because it’s going to be a lamp, so you have to learn how to wire it. It’s full MEP-type projects.
Generally, the kids are making their own projects. These are things they can take home, show and share with their parents and be very proud of. Sometimes, they’re making duct work as well. We’re showing them a little of everything. We even have camps that are teaching HVAC service a little bit. They go up on roofs and they show them what an air conditioning unit is.
Kirk: So there’s nothing notional or kitschy about this. These are real skills in real training centers. These are the pre-apprentice or pre-pre-apprentice stuff.
Angie: Sometimes, pre-apprentice aren’t allowed to do some of this stuff by the union side. We’re letting them weld. Welding is the thing that the kids seem to like the most.
One of my camps, Dee Cramer, has them learn all kinds of different things. He has them weld a fire pit that they can take home. They got the Heavy Metal emblem cut out on the laser, but then they weld the whole fire pit together. These kids bring home a fire pit that they now keep in their backyard and they can say they made that.
Kirk: I have just personal failing throughout all my… I’ve tried to learn to weld, find a place to learn. It’s one of those things, you can’t just go to the store and buy a welder. There’s a little bit of a learning gap there. I’ve tried to find a place that’ll teach me to weld. I would’ve loved this in high school. This is incredible.
Angie: I’ll be honest as well. I am a mechanical engineer. When I was in school, I had a welding class, and a turning and milling class. I’ll tell you, I’m a terrible welder. I kept putting holes through the metal. I was terrible at it. But it gave me a healthy appreciation of what welders do.
Kirk: It’s funny to that point. This is a little off-topic, but I came through the IATSE side. I was union, but I came through the show running side. I was a show runner and we were hiring a bunch of riggers because it was a big, big show. We ran this thing, the entire time I was super behind the eight ball. The riggers were telling me what they needed. I was like, sure, okay. I didn’t know.
At the end, I went to my employer and I said, hey, you need to send me to the six-week rigger training in Chicago. They’re like, you’re not a rigger. I was like, right, but you give me all of these shows that have all these riggers. I don’t need to be a rigger, but I really need to understand what they’re doing. They’re like, okay. They sent me to a six-week rigging training.
I have since become an IATSE rigger. I’ve rigged shows now because I did the training, and it was pretty fun. It’s like what you said. You might not be a good welder, but you speak welding, you understand what welding requires.
Angie: And I have a respect for those that do the work. When I started at Western Allied, I remember that very quickly. I went out in our shop and there’s somebody welding and I’m like, wow, I’m impressed. They do much better than I did.
Now, we’ve got some robotics that do welding as well, and the kids learn that as well. I will say that we have found that, at the camps, it seems the girls are better welders. A lot of that might be that at high school age, the attention to detail, the women seem to be a little more attention—
Kirk: I’d buy that. That makes utter sense to me, absolutely. We talked at the beginning, a big thing is changing the perception by the parents, by the kids of just understanding that this is an aspirational thing that you can do it and you can build it. What misconceptions do you hear most often and how do these camps help break through those walls?
Angie: I think construction does have a wrong perception. We in construction have to keep working on changing that perception. I don’t know if I can say this or not, but I go around and say, hey, it’s not the butt crack industry you’re thinking of. We all think about in-the-dirt all the time and it is just dirty/nasty all the time. But with technology today and the way we’re using technology in construction, it’s really become a very different industry.
These kids that we’re dealing with in high school were born with a phone in their hand. They know technology. So we make sure to share with them the amazing technology that’s involved in construction as well.
There was a young woman who was at a graduation that I went to a number of years ago. She said, well, this was really fun, but I really want to do robotics. She goes, so I don’t know. I go, there are a lot of robotics in construction. She went, really? And I go, we need people who want to run robotics. She said, well, maybe this is an industry for me. I think we have to make them aware of all the possibilities that we have in the industry.
We’re also focused on making the industry look a little different. If we need 400,000 workers right now and we have 42% of the industry retiring over the next five years, we need to tap some untapped sources. We’re stressing that the percentage of women in the industry is not enough.
Also minorities. It’s a fairly white male industry to a certain degree. So we are focusing on underserved at risk areas and trying to say, let’s make this industry look a little different. We need to let women know (for example) that you don’t have to be the 200-pound buff guy to be working in the field, not with our tools today. So we try to share that vision with them as well.
Kirk: What do you say to that junior/senior in high school that is really looking at their options of I want to go to college but this was a fun experience. What do you say to them to maybe help those that are skeptical about the college versus trades conversation?
Angie: Well, here I’m a mechanical engineer. I went to college and both my sons did go to college. I’ve got one that’s a journalist and one that is actually in our industry, worked for Western Allied for a while, and now is working for a software company that is in construction.
There’s nothing wrong with college, and if somebody says, I think I still want to go to college, I said, okay, great. But do you realize the construction industry is a great industry to work in and it pays really well? Why don’t you consider looking at construction management? Or why don’t you look at something that you can do in college where you can get into the construction industry and you have a healthy appreciation for what the trades do in the field.
But I also think that if my younger one who worked [...] us, he says, mom, with all your support of the trades, why didn’t you just have me go through the trades? And I said, well, you know what? You were able to get in college and you went to a state school here in California, so it didn’t cost that much. You were lucky and that your parents could afford to pay for you to go to college. But I said, you know what? It’s an option, and if you want to go into the trades now, you can do it. He said, well, I’m enjoying what I’m doing. Again, it’s one of those things where I think we’re finding.
I’m on the board at Cal Poly where I went to school for engineering—I’m on the dean’s advisory board—and he told us the other day that two-thirds of kids graduating high school are not going to college, that only one-third are going to colleges. And I think that’s four-year colleges. I think the other two-thirds, some of them are going to two-year colleges.
But I also think a lot of the trades right now, if you’re in my area, in local 104 and local 467, if you go for five-year apprenticeships, you get an AA degree when you graduate from your apprenticeship. A lot of the apprentices are working with the junior colleges to give you an associate’s degree when you graduate from your apprenticeship. Many, many contractors in SMACNA have come through the trades and now run their own businesses.
It’s really cool when we talk to these kids, because we tell them, just because you’re going through the trades doesn’t mean you can’t run your own business. It’ll give you a start in the business and then you can go from there. So I hope these kids can see that anything is theirs. The world is an oyster. If they get some hands-on experience, they’re going to get a chance to do whatever they want with it.
Kirk: Absolutely. Now, you’ve said previously that you started challenging contractors to stop complaining and get some skin in the game. What advice would you give to a contractor listening right now who’s considering launching a camp?
Angie: For example, Heavy Metal Summer Experience, we really have a great playbook and we’ll help you with it. It does take some time, but the side benefit of the fact that: (a) you’re helping the industry, (b) you’re helping these kids. You’re changing their lives and you’re helping the parents understand that. But on top of that you’re getting great employees.
We’re seeing in our camps, usually we go with 16, 17, 18, 19 year olds. You’ve got some kids going back into junior year, back into senior year, but about 20% of graduated high school they’re in our camp. Of those 20% that have graduated high school, we’re seeing about 65% of them going into jobs in construction. It immediately helps them to get into construction and these contractors are hiring them, and I think that’s really, really neat.
When I talk to our contractors, they’re like, oh, I picked two kids off. I hired two kids in this camp. If they had 16 kids, they probably only had 4 that had graduated. Then a couple of them said, well, one of them didn’t want to, but the other three did. So we hired two and we referred one to the union or whatever.
I think it’s something that we can also encourage our training centers to do. It doesn’t have to always be run in a contractor’s camp/in a shop, but I will say the contractors are the ones that hire the kids. Our union training centers can do all they want, but they need somebody to hire the kids. So we as contractors have to hire the kids.
Sometimes, it means when we slow down, we still need to keep our pre-apprentices busy and keep them employed, or even our apprentices keep them employed so they can get more training, even when we’re slow. Sometimes, it costs us a little extra, but it’s worth it for the future, particularly as we train these kids.
Kirk: Absolutely. Now, it might be self-evident to a lot of people listening, but I’m going to ask anyway. If you could boil down the Heavy Metal Summer Experience, what’s the goal? What’s the prime moving goal of the experience for these kids?
Angie: Really, it’s an awareness goal. We would love to help them get jobs, but really we want to make them aware of the possibilities of what a career in the trades could be. That’s our focus. And to change their perception of construction. Probably to change their parents’ perception of construction is really the better goal on that side of it, because I don’t think the kids have much of a perception, period, but the parents did. Even counselors. We’re starting to see how counselors are changing their perception too.
Kirk: What roles do the labor leaders and the contractors have in helping scale that awareness and push things like Heavy Metal Summer Experience?
Angie: One of the things I learned, and this is interesting, I ran a for-profit contractor. We’re all for-profit contractors. We have to make money to be able to proceed. I know how to make money. But now I’m running a nonprofit, so now I have to ask for money.
Supporting groups like this is very helpful. That’s where I’m struggling a little bit right now. My growth has grown so fast that if you want to help, look to our website and see if you can host us, help us sponsor us a little bit. But more than that, I think if you’re a contractor or you’re a training center, don’t be afraid to take that step. We have to get the awareness back in the high schools.
Ultimately somebody asked me, do you see Heavy Metal going on forever? I said, actually, my wish and my desire is that 10, 15, 20 years from now, all of our high schools have shops back in our high schools and we’re teaching about the career and the trades in all of our high schools, and they’re getting a chance to do the welding and the high school and that type of thing so that they can experience there.
Ultimately, my goal would be, no, if Heavy Metal convinces the high schools that it’s an important step. The perception within the careers is changing. Last summer, we got an article in the Wall Street Journal. I was on CNN a couple of times, so we’re starting to get some traction that people are accepting, that you don’t necessarily have to go to college to have a great career.
Kirk: You have run a large for-profit contracting company, you’ve been the president of a large national association, and now you are leading this large nonprofit. What is a leadership lesson that has carried through all three of those that is helping you build this experience?
Angie: First I admit, as my husband will say, when I retired from work at Western Allied in 21, that I’m failing at that now, that I am not retired anymore and working more than I had planned.
Leadership role, I love one thing. I’ve been passionate about what I do, period. I love construction. I always have. To be involved in construction and to be a leader in construction, I’ve enjoyed it so much. I feel like I need to give back now, that doing something like this with this nonprofit is giving back to the industry that gave me so much.
There is a common theme there. I think the way I’m a leader, I lead with passion and desire, and I lead with the people within our industry. I remember the story. I tell this story, I remember the story that I had five years of college. I took the five year plan because I played softball at Cal Poly too; I had that extra year. Got out of school, worked for another contractor for a year. So it’s been six years now out of high school.
Go to Western Allied now. Somewhere in the middle of my seventh year since high school, I’m working with one of my foreman, a pipe fitter. He was the same age as I was. He had been turned out as a journey person for a couple of years now, and he bought his own house in the Bay Area. He just bought his own house. He’d been working for seven years and he had enough money to buy his own house in the Bay area.
Me? No. I was paying my parents back for college. I was paying rent. What an amazing career. That’s when I also realized that my field technicians, my foreman, my journey people, my shop people, they were the smartest guys in the world, and mostly guys at the time. That’s back in the 80s, but mostly guys. I’m like, they could have gone to college, but they chose this career and they did really well for themselves with this career.
I look at that back and think, boy, we really need to understand that there are many good paths to a future for your life, and it doesn’t have to include college. So that was my takeaway at that time when that pipe fitter bought a house in the Bay Area.
Kirk: That’s incredible. I like it. Just the Bay Area, buying a house at any level, but seven years out of high school, that’s absolutely astounding. That’s incredible. So really, what’s next for Heavy Metal Summer Experience? What do you hope the program looks like in another five years?
Angie: Five years is hard to predict because that’s always out there. But we are very excited that we are finally hiring an executive director. I’ve been playing that role, but we’re growing so fast that I definitely need help. We have just been actually interviewing, so we’re just about done with that, and we are going to hire an executive director to help us go to the next level.
We expect to have about 1200 kids next summer. I’ve already got a bunch of new camps already signed up for next summer. Canada’s got a couple more too. I’m guessing 1200 next summer, maybe 1600 the following summer. From there, I just got to figure it out because again, it’s a little bit of logistics.
We are in the franchise mode in that we have to find hosts. I have to find hosts that volunteer. But the neat thing is, in those 51 camps that I had last summer, all of them pretty much have said we’re coming back. I start with 51 camps or close to it. That’s the thing that’s helped me a lot is that it’s easy to find another 15 or 20 camps, but those 51 come back. I think that’s because they really find it very rewarding to help these kids to help find good people for their industry.
Kirk: Now I’m curious. This one’s just pure personal curiosity. You have all these 51 camps and all these campers. What does the full-time staff look like? It’s you and how…?
Angie: It’s me. Currently right now, I have my old executive assistant from Western Allied. She retired and I gave her six months off, and then I convinced her to come work for me. She works 15–20 hours a week. But we do have marketing. Nelson, which is a marketing company, does our website that helps us immensely. They’ve been a big hand.
Really right now, until we hire this new executive director, it’s me as the founder and a co-founder and president of the board, and Dawn. She and I have been very busy. This last summer when we got to May, right before summer started, we were wiped because we had to handle 51 camps and get them ready to go, making sure that everything’s aligned.
But the summer, I’ve told Dawn. I said, you need to go to some graduations because you and I are both exhausted from getting ready for this. But when you go to a graduation, it is so re-energizing to see those kids and those parents. You really realize it’s all worth it.
We are grown. We need to grow. I think as a nonprofit, the fundraising side of things is something that I’m learning about. That’s where we’re focusing now because we need to be able to fund what we’re doing.
Kirk: As someone who’s worked in a lot of different industries and a lot of different aspects, doing what you’ve done more or less by yourself, a few small helpers here and there is absolutely incredible. How can the listeners support your work? You got that executive director coming in, but how can the contractors and the listeners help? Whether that’s starting a camp, volunteering, spreading the word, what can we do for you?
Angie: Check out our website. For one, I think we have some on our website, so it’s hmse.org, and that stands for Heavy-Metal-Summer-Experience-dot-org. But if you check out our website, one, I love them. Look at the website because we have some amazing videos on the website of the different camps. It really gives you an idea of the excitement of the camps, how good they are.
Then we have information about if you’re a student, how you find a camp. Our map is on there, so if you’re interested, take a look. We’ll be updating our map probably in January for 2026 camps. We’re getting applications right now for hosts, so we haven’t finalized that. We’ll finalize that by January. But in January or February, look at our map and see if there’s a camp near you that you could: (a) go check it out, (b) you could volunteer potentially.
One of the things I like to see, we have union instructors, but the more adults we have who volunteer, we can keep an eye on the kids, that safety’s better. I like to have two kids to one adult ratio where we have a set of eyes on them to make sure that as they’re soldering or welding, they’re not got their hair in the welder or anything like that.
And then on top of that, if you feel like making a donation, we would love that as well. That’s on our website as well. We also have been really excited with the amazing corporate sponsors we have. Our unions, SMACNA, and SMART, which is the sheet metal union and the sheet metal contractors have been a huge partner of ours from the very beginning, and they are a major donor. They’ve committed $100,000 over three years.
We’ve gotten help from MCA. We need to branch that into. We need to get MCA and UA to do the same thing. We need to get NECA and IBEW to do the same thing. We’re looking for some financial support from the unions if we can, and the trade associations if we can as well.
We also have Train and Procore. A lot of construction companies that vendors who sell stuff realize that it’s the next step. They have to help our industry if we’re going to continue.
Kirk: It’s all part of the funnel. It’s all a vital part of the funnel. Angie, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your Heavy Metal Summer Experience story. It’s really inspiring to see how this one idea in two shops during the pandemic has grown into a movement of, you said 51 camps now?
Angie: This past summer in 2025. I think next summer we’ll probably be at 70-ish.
Kirk: Fifty-one–plus camps in North America in just less than five years. That’s incredible.
Angie: I thought when I started this, we were going to drop a little pebble in the water and we’ll make a little change, a little ripple. I think we’re doing a boulder right now, and I think we got tidal waves coming.
Kirk: You mentioned it again, but I’m going to say it again for the listeners. If you’d like to learn more, check out hmse.org, and check out the map and see if there’s something near you. Angie, thank you again and thanks to everyone for tuning in to Talk the TAUC. Angie, I really thank you so much.
Angie: Well, thank you for letting me talk about this. Everyone that can hear about it, we love it. Reach out to me. Any email on that website is mine.
[email protected] is me too. I appreciate you guys listening to this. Thank you.
Kirk: Angie, thanks again. And thank you all for tuning in to Talk the TAUC. Until next time, keep building strong partnerships, investing in that next generation, and helping every worker go home safe and proud.
