Paul Ham couldn’t find good handymen on his own, so he decided to train them himself.
Three years later, home improvement contracting company Brookline Proven employs six current and recent Brookline High School students and teaches them how to launch their own businesses.
“We work here,” Ham said. “We live here. We know Brookline homes, so that’s where we work.”
Brookline Proven, so named for the home contracting company’s hyper-local focus, hires and trains young people from Brookline High School in trades and handyman jobs, from bathroom remodeling to landscaping. But more than that, it teaches these kids how they can go on to start their own businesses.
Brookline Proven began three years ago when two Little League coaches, Ham and Malcolm Wilbur, grabbed coffee. They landed on the perfect project: use what they knew about home improvement, help people and still make it home to spend time with their families.
When asked how this project came about, Ham stated it simply: “I can’t find good people,” he said. “So I’m going to train them myself.”
Working on his own home in Brookline, Ham said he noticed the lack of reliable tradespeople in the town. Then, he said, he noticed the difficulty in getting the opportunity to learn trades.
Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Ham said he had easy access to learning regular trades — his middle school taught woodworking and how to work with small engines.
“I grew up mowing lawns all the time, but our young adults here don’t have lawns to mow,” Ham said. “And they don’t have people to teach them.”
In Brookline, though, the closest trade schools are still far and rather expensive, he said.
Through Steps to Success, a Brookline Public Schools program that helps low-income students and families find academic support and career development, Brookline Proven has found many employees.
Ham works further with Steps to Success and Brookline High School social worker Paul Epstein — whom Ham also ran into getting coffee — to teach seminars about entrepreneurship.
Epstein says some of the students he’s sent Ham’s way were “at a crossroads” at the end of their high school career, unable to attend college and unsure where else to turn.
“I’ve rarely met someone in the position to be able to hire a young person that has more commitment to young people than Paul,” Epstein said.
Wilbur said even though Brookline doesn’t necessarily have a low-income youth problem, he and Ham believe in helping anyway. Kids that have grown up and lived in Brookline for the past 20 years may eventually have to move — they won’t inherit their family home, and if their college isn’t paid for, they may not be able to afford the high living costs at all.
“It’s just mutually beneficial for a homeowner in Brookline to want to hire someone from Brookline to form this potential relationship that really could last for the duration of someone’s lease or a decade or two while they live in the house,” he said.
Ham said this hyper-local model, where employees come from Brookline and work here — often walking the few blocks to work sites— works because the community wants to support itself.
“These types of places have a lack of local tradespeople,” he said. “They love investing in the community, so they love using local partners who have that accountability and that actual true neighborhood feel to it.”
Currently a team of nine, some of Ham and Wilbur’s apprentices are students still in high school; others are recent grads, college students and athletes; and some attend trade school.
Stephanie Gravely, a 20-year-old student and basketball player at Bunker Hill Community College, has been working for Brookline Proven for a little over a year after a teacher directed her to Ham.
Gravely said she likes it a lot. The hours are flexible, accounting for her busy schedule as a student-athlete; she enjoys working with people her age; and appreciates the opportunity to get her foot in the door.
“There are other places you can get this work done, but I feel like we’re local and we’re affordable,” Gravely said.
With the experience gained with Brookline Proven, Gravely said she’s open and looking forward to going out on her own to do jobs.
Apprentices not only join Ham and Wilbur on client consultations and jobs, but they’re included in the social media marketing aspects and sales systems, too.
When Ham finds possible candidates, he hires them as apprentices with the “eventual purpose to launch them on their own businesses by themselves,” he said.
Brookline Proven is looking for more than high school students to expand the business, he said, calling on retirees and mentors interested in teaching general trade jobs.
There may someday soon be a Cambridge Proven or a Providence Proven. The space for locally sourced, young people-driven home improvement contracting is available in a lot of places, he says.
“I always think of this thing called ethical neighborhoods,” Ham said. “If you have high income, high education, and density, you tend to have people who want to support local artists and businesses. I think the education and the income and the wanting to live in a city just means you’re invested in the place that you live.”