Closing the Gap: RO Partners with Camp NAWIC to Turn Students into Builders

Aug 7, 2026
camp nawic volunteers

A 4-minute read on how RO’s Austin team is helping inspire the next wave of builders, one camper at a time.

Since 2019 RO’s Austin team has swapped the office for a hands-on classroom at Camp NAWIC, a free week-long day camp that introduces girls in sixth through ninth grade to the trades. The goal is simple but powerful: show the next generation that a career in construction is not just possible, but exciting, creative, and built for them.

Hosted by the Austin chapter of the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC), this year’s camp welcomed 40 girls from school districts across Central Texas. Each one gets outfitted like a pro: hard helmet, gloves, safety glasses, apron, and a bag of tools worth over $500 to take home. The whole week, from the meals to the materials to the gear, is funded by the industry, which in the volunteers’ words, “pays it forward.”

A week of building confidence

Over five days, campers rotate through carpentry, electrical, plumbing, heavy equipment, safety, and leadership. The projects are as fun as they are formative. New campers built dog houses that were later donated to a local animal shelter, while returning campers took on picnic tables. The girls poured concrete stepping stones, soldered and cleaned copper pipe, burned their own monograms into cutting boards, and made key holders for their front doors. A heavy equipment demonstration put them in the driver’s seat of real machinery, and field trips took them to Rosendin Electric to wire a working lamp and to the Plumbers and Sheet Metal Union to seat a toilet with a wax seal.

New campers wear yellow shirts.
Returning campers wear orange shirts.
Campers receive $500 worth of construction equipment.
This summer they welcomed 16 new campers and 24 returning.

The creativity showed up right away. When it came time to paint the dog houses, the campers had strong opinions about their colors and styles.

“Just seeing the creativity behind it was really cool,” said Terri Michalak, an RO team member with more than 35 years in construction and several Camp NAWIC committees behind her. “One was like a graffiti art-style dog house.”

For Terri, the best part is watching each camper realize what she’s capable of.

dog houses built by NAWIC campers
New students built and painted dog houses donated to a local shelter.
picnic tables built by returning NAWIC campers
Returning students built folding picnic tables.
The picnic table opened.

Not that a week with a room full of middle schoolers and power tools goes off without a hitch. Terri still laughs about the year a few campers carried their paintbrushes to the bathroom to rinse them and somehow got paint all over the ceiling and walls. Camp NAWIC lives by one rule above all: leave the Carpenters Hall cleaner than you found it. So the volunteers took it upon themselves to spend their night scrubbing paint off the ceiling — true dedication to doing things right.

Natural leaders at work

Left to Right, Katerina Kotova and Terri Michalak volunteer with Camp NAWIC.

Put the girls in groups, hand them a problem, and watch their personalities and instincts take over.

“You could see there was always an unspoken leader in the group,” said Assistant Estimator Katerina Kotova, who joined the construction industry about a year ago and volunteered at the camp for the first time. “It was interesting to see how they approach the problems.”

Terri saw it too. “Their personalities come out, and the natural leaders just rise up.”

What struck Katerina was how differently these campers see the industry than she did at their age.

“When I was growing up, there was nothing like Camp NAWIC. When I told my mom I wanted to be an engineer, she almost cried, because she thought it wasn’t a career for women. But for these girls, it’s just normal. As they grow up, they have a bigger spectrum of careers to choose from.”

Women make up roughly 11 percent of the U.S. construction workforce, and in the skilled trades. For on-site craft roles specifically, that number drops to about 4 percent.

Those are the same field positions where the labor shortage bites hardest. Camp NAWIC faces that gap head-on, introducing girls to carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and heavy equipment through real hands-on work, well before they settle on a career. Rather than telling them construction is an option, the camp lets them prove it to themselves with a tool in hand.

An industry-wide effort

The proof that Camp NAWIC works is clear, in that some of the volunteers running stations this year were campers themselves not long ago. Now that they’ve established their careers, they’re passing the baton to the next generation.

That’s the pipeline in action. The Austin chapter of NAWIC is more than 100 members strong, and the week runs on industry partners like the Carpenters Union, Rosendin Electric, and the Plumbers and Sheet Metal Union opening their doors and their expertise. On Friday, parents filled the hall for a graduation ceremony, certificates and all. For RO, showing up is simple math: the people who will build Texas over the next 30 years are in that workshop right now, and the industry is better off opening the door to them early.