PIERRE MIDDLETON-BAEZ: NEW FOUND GROWTH CORPORATION
Both images above: NFGC’ s on-site work at Park Presidio for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration( NOAA).
had just made back it home after the long drive, when Zelda called to see how things had gone.“ When she learned that I’ d left without getting that sponsorship form signed, she told me to get back in my car and drive back to get that paper signed.” Pierre reluctantly did so, but thanks to her insistence, he secured Kiewit’ s sponsorship that same day and was accepted into UA Local 467.“ It really came down to the wire,” he says.“ I graduated from the CBA program the following week and started my apprenticeship.”
Clearing those hurdles, however, just marked the start of additional challenges that Pierre would have to overcome.
The apprenticeship group was made up of Half Moon Bay and Pacifica natives whose family members were also in the trades, so for the first two years, Pierre felt rather isolated. As he remembers,“ It was a pretty
tight-knit community in which everyone knew each other, so I was definitely an outsider in terms of my ethnicity and community. There was not a lot of diversity on the job, but I was fortunate to have a great foreman who encouraged me. The first day on the job, he drove me to the gate of the work site and said,‘ See that gate? The first thing you do is leave your emotions at the gate.’ He was helping to prepare me for how my co-workers would try to push me to a breaking point. So I learned early on to not let others get under my skin and to never take what happens at work home with me.”
Pierre’ s grandmother’ s guidance also came back to him during the hardest times.“ She used to tell me that people are going to talk crazy stuff – that if people can talk bad about Jesus, they’ d certainly talk bad about me. She said that as long as no one puts a hand on me, to just let their words roll right off my back, so that’ s what I did. I focused
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