ABOUT



"I started at the company six months ago knowing almost nothing about electrical. Learning the required technical skills you need in the electrical field is definitely the most challenging. It can be very overwhelming but, the experience is worth it. Through it all, I love what I do and am very grateful for this opportunity." Gabriel L., 2024 CCCF Recipient

6 16 35 $119,000
DISTRICTS RECIPIENTS PARTNERSHIPS AWARDED
CCCF BOARD MEMBERS
Anastasia Gavalas, Managing Partner of BuildTheory Inc, Ed Bulgin, Founder of Bulgin & Associates, Julie Hatfield, President of Wright & Co
Anna Brochu, CCCF Program Coordinator
WHO WE ARE
The Construction Career Charitable Fund, CCCF, established in 2021 is redefining possibilities for local East End graduates, offering unparalleled pathways into the world of skilled trades. Created by three of the Hamptons’ most respected and prestigious luxury home builders, this exclusive initiative combines mentorship, skills training, job placements, and up to $10,000 in financial support to launch the next generation of master craftspeople. With a commitment to excellence and community, we’re shaping futures for young people and elevating the trades to their rightful place of integrity and opportunity. In collaboration with local schools, we help direct graduates to innovative careers, closing the skills gap, and filling the critical need for skilled professionals everywhere.
The Construction Career Charitable Fund was inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet by Michael Meyer
Benjamin Franklin publicized his core beliefs: loyalty and patriotism, racial and gender equality, education and public service. But before signing away the last of his fortune, Franklin drew up an imaginative scheme.
At a time when the demise of the United States seemed more likely than its success – when the banking system was fledgling and the dollar so unstable that it had yet to be made the official currency – Franklin placed a final bet on the “rising generation” of young tradesmen.
To his hometowns of Boston and Philadelphia, he gifted twin funds to jump-start what we now call blue-collar careers. The money was to be continually doled out in low-interest loans across two hundred years. ON the bicentennial of his death, the accounts – fattened by centuries of earning compound interest – could be cased out and spent on civic improvements.
Franklin believed that skilled workers formed the foundation of American democracy. They provided crucial services while interacting daily with people of all classes, creeds, and colors. Essentially, they kept the pulse of a community’s street-level public and economic life and laid the groundwork (literally) of a healthy society. “Good apprentices,” Franklin wrote in his will, “are most likely to make good citizens.”
What happened to Franklin’s fortune and his hopeful wager on the working class? Surprisingly, given the swings in the nation’s fortunes between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, his bet paid off, although not in the manner, or with the results, that he had predicted. But like the lessons from his life, Franklin’s death has much to teach us still.
“The slightest events in the life of a famous man,” eulogized one of his Parisian friends, “become the most interesting, when they give birth to a new way of thinking that all of a sudden changes the direction of his will.”