An Ottawa-based group that offers professional women in the building world opportunities to meet up and possibly forge business relationships is taking off in a fashion unexpected by its founders.
“We hoped it would go really far and get large but we didn’t see this happening. We hit the ground running,” says Kristen Buter, co-founder of City BuildHERS.
The idea behind City BuildHERS is to connect women in a wide range of fields such as construction, architecture, engineering and real estate property management and development.
“There are other (support) groups that just have female engineers, or just female general contractors. We want women from every sector…in the same room,” says Buter.
The organization was founded last year and has seen “an overwhelming response” from women in many sectors of the building industry.
“We’ve even had people asking us if this is something franchisable or if there is a chapter somewhere else. We haven’t thought that far ahead,” says Buter.
Buter, vice-president of property management at Mastercraft Starwood Canada, and co-founder Jennifer Cross, business development manager of MARANT Construction Limited, say the event-driven organization has seen brisk ticket sales to various presentations, including one by the women-led prime consultants of the Parliament Buildings’ Centre Block rehabilitation.
“We (women) had a lot of the trades working on the project, engineers, interior designers, architects and we had buyers as well.”
Tickets are expected to sell out for another presentation in November that profiles the women who are leading prime consultants in charge of The Ottawa Hospital redevelopment, she says.
City BuildHERS is a response to a pressing need. The building industry has always offered men opportunities to share ideas and do business together but women have largely been left on the sidelines, Buter says.
A financial planner who moved into construction, she currently works with Mastercraft Starwood on many new build highrises.
She says many women in highly responsible positions in building fields have stressful jobs that carry over to home life where they are moms raising children, caring for husbands and sometimes even elderly parents.
“It is a full separate job that usually gets overlooked.”
How to deal with the pressures and stress of daily life are among the topics City BuildHERS will raise as it continues to grow.
At a recent event on heart health, which it hosted in partnership with the University of Ottawa Heart Institute Foundation, City BuildHERS received an “overwhelming” response from the women in the industry in and around Ottawa.
While ticket sales are a major source of revenue for the organization, Buter says the initiative also gets support from sponsors ranging from a major developer to smaller contractors and suppliers in Ottawa.
Further support will come next year when the two co-founders will sell memberships to the organization. Those memberships will include a number of benefits such as a directory of women in the industry.
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