Dixwell Rebuilders Plan Construction Academy

As a construction crew worked to lay the foundation for ​“ConnCAT Place on Dixwell,” redevelopers behind the neighborhood-transforming effort gathered in an underground classroom a few hundred feet away to lay the foundation for a more diverse, locally rooted construction workforce.

Such is the latest with the building up of the former Dixwell Plaza site on Dixwell Avenue between Webster and Charles streets.

Connecticut Community Outreach and Revitalization Program (ConnCORP) officially broke ground on the first part of the project — a planned new 69,000 square-foot headquarters for ConnCAT, a related nonprofit worker training center — last October. 

That office building is scheduled to be complete and open by March 2026. It marks the start of a larger redevelopment vision that dates back years. Other city-approved components include 186 units of mixed-income apartments, a Cornell Scott-Hill Health child mental health and family center, a Friends Center for Children-affiliated daycare, a grocery store and food hall, a greenspace, retail storefronts, and a performing arts venue.

On Monday at noon, nearly a dozen members of the development team, including ConnCORP CEO Erik Clemons and Vice President of Real Estate Ian Williams, suited up in white hard hats and yellow vests to tour the active construction site. General contractor Whiting-Turner’s construction crew has already placed the new ConnCAT office building’s footings there and is getting ready to install steel frames on the southern portion of the site.

While that construction work is underway, ConnCORP has undertaken a different type of redevelopment that promises to have just as transformative an impact on the neighborhood and New Haven at large.

That’s the organization’s planned new Construction Academy, which ConnCORP and ConnCAT are looking to launch in mid-April.

The academy will be run out of a newly built classroom below ground at the former Hill Health clinic building at the corner of Dixwell and Charles, which marks the northeastern-most edge of the Dixwell Plaza redevelopment.

In that classroom, lead instructor Pat Medor and program director Steve Driffin will oversee training a 20-student cohort in the skills necessary to become certified plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and HVAC technicians.

The program will complement other adult job-training efforts already undertaken by ConnCAT, including in the fields of medical billing and coding, phlebotomy, bioscience, and the culinary arts.

Medor, a general contractor who runs a company called Genexo Associates, said that the construction-training school will meet two times a week, for three hours a day, over the course of 22 weeks. 

Driffin said that anyone 18 and older with a high school degree or GED is welcome to apply. New Haven residency is preferred, but not required. The program is free to attend, though interested students do have to apply. 

Clemons said that the program has already received more than 40 applications, just a few days after ConnCORP announced the effort.

Clemons said that the construction academy has been in the works for about a year.

“We made a promise to the community that people in this community would have an opportunity to work on this project,” he said. His team and Whiting-Turner soon realized that they were getting many fewer applications than they’d hoped for from contractors and subcontractors ​“who look like us,” who come from and live in New Haven, who are Black construction workers looking to help build up the center one of the city’s historic Black neighborhoods.

Clemons said that there are plenty of New Haveners who ​“have the knowhow and will” to work on a construction project like this, but who lack the necessary licenses and credit.

So ConnCORP identified which credentials would be needed to help people land jobs on developments projects like ConnCAT Place on Dixwell, and decided to build out a training program to help locals do exactly that.

“This gives these individuals an opportunity [for on-site, paid apprenticeships] while the building is going up,” Medor said. It’s ​“an opportunity for the youngsters to get into the trades.” After all, for as many things as artificial intelligence can and will do, ​“A.I. can’t put in a toilet.”

Williams said that attending this new construction academy will not guarantee a graduate a job working on the ConnCAT Place on Dixwell development project. Students have to earn those spots by putting in the work. But it will place them in an advantageous spot to land work on this development, and in New Haven, at a time when so much building is going on across the city.

Williams said that the project’s general contractor, Whiting-Turner, has agreed to incorporate eligible students from the construction academy into the Dixwell Plaza redevelopment. Clemons said the construction academy is working with the local job-placement program New Haven Works as the training program gets off the ground.

The classroom itself consists of a familiar setup of tables and chairs at the front of the room, as well as ​“working walls,” a drop ceiling towards, and other hands-on work stations to allow for more practical educational opportunities for the electricians and plumbers to-be.

Williams said that ConnCORP’s goal is to run two 20-student, 22-week construction academy sessions each year, if this first one — set to start on April 14 — is successful. ​“We’re gonna have a pipeline” of locally trained, locally rooted, certified and capable construction workers, he said. 

Based on how many applications ConnCORP has already received for this program, Clemons added, ​“there’s a market” for such a school.

Clemons marveled at the newly built-out classroom as he took a tour alongside his team Monday morning. ​“It looks like we’re ready,” he said. ​“This is exciting.”

Click here to apply to the new Construction Academy.