Giving back

Sertoma Star Services describes its work as empowering people with disabilities, their families, and people living with mental illness to achieve personal success by providing choices and opportunities. In practice that covers intellectual and developmental disability services, mental health counseling, special recreation, and employment support.

The organization runs four locations across Illinois and Indiana, including Alsip and Chicago Heights in Illinois and Merrillville in Indiana. Lombard Architectural Precast casts in Alsip, so this is support going to an organization working in the same town as the plant, and across the Northwest Indiana communities the chapter serves.

Craftsman with Character Foundation is a 501(c)(3) based in Edgerton, Wisconsin, working on two fronts at once. It gives high school students real exposure to the skilled trades, and it mentors people already working in manufacturing who want to grow.

The foundation describes its purpose as restoring dignity to skilled work and building responsibility in the trades. That covers both halves of the problem a precast plant faces: finding people, and keeping them.

Trowel Trades in Education is RHK Construction’s own non-profit, built around a simple problem: most students never touch the trades before they have to choose a direction. The program brings the work to school career centers, where students tuck point thin brick, run caulk joints, grout tile, and learn what PPE and site safety actually mean.

The stated aim is putting schools first and encouraging the next generation to build. For an industry that competes for skilled hands every season, that is the pipeline being built one classroom at a time.