West Fresno’s City College campus gets new training center. ‘Ticket to the middle class?’
U.S. Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, and other community leaders huddled Monday on the unpaved ground of Fresno City College’s West Campus construction site to highlight another construction project coming to west Fresno.
The Central Valley Training Center will be built with the support of nearly $2 million in federal funds.
Chuck Riojas of the Fresno / Madera / Tulare / Kings Building Trades Council said the center would serve as a “ticket to the middle class” for west Fresno, which is racked with some of the city’s highest poverty rates.
“Growing up on the west side as a kid, I can tell you, it’s changed a lot,” Costa said. “It’s suffered from neglect. But we’re turning that around.”
The center will offer classes in construction, manufacturing, information technology and welding.
The community leaders behind this new center said they hope to recruit women, minorities, the formerly incarcerated and other underrepresented groups for the training.
They plan to do this through community outreach and relying on their partners from community-based organizations, leaders said at the press conference.
Five years in the making
Lee Ann Eager, president of the Fresno County Economic Development Corporation, said they started dreaming of this training center roughly five years ago, in 2017.
She and other partners took a trip to Oakland to look at what is now known as the Cypress Mandela Training Center, which provides pre-apprentice construction and life skills training for people in the Bay Area.
“We said: ‘Oh man, we need one of those,’” Eager said. “We’re going to do that in Fresno. We’re going to do it bigger and better.”
Planning the center’s construction timeline is in the initial stages now that federal funding has been secured, said Carole Goldsmith, chancellor of the State Center Community College District.
Fresno City College’s west campus construction is already underway and expected to open during the spring 2023 semester, Goldsmith said.
Investing in west Fresno
So what makes this training center unique?
“Location, location, location,” Costa said.
The goal is to help west Fresno residents find sufficient training and employment in the community instead of being forced to leave the area for school or other job opportunities, Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias said.
Not only that, but the partners behind the project were also intentional about doubling down on public education and training opportunities.
“You’ll also see a lot of private vocational colleges offering vocational training, but you come out with significant debt,” Arias said. “Those programs don’t address the huge need for those who are hard to hire (and) under-served.”
Several union representatives from building and skilled trades attended the news conference Monday as a show of support for the expansion of opportunities in vocational training.
Michael Lopez, a representative for the sheet metal workers’ local union, told The Bee’s Education Lab that he wouldn’t be where he is today without city college after growing up in Mendota, where all he ever knew was farm labor.
“I grew up in public housing,” he said. “So you know, (coming from) not even owning a home on my own — I own three now. Not to brag, but it put me in that position where my future’s taken care of.”
After decades of broken promises to the people of west Fresno, Arias said there’s still a hurdle when it comes to convincing community members that investments like the training center are really happening.
“We’re going to have to show people that we actually kept our word,” he said, “built a modern facility that anybody can be proud of with the training programs specifically targeted for the area with the most needs, which is west Fresno.”
This story was originally published April 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
