The 2025 BBB Trades Scholarship

Katie Grevious, Marketing and Community Relations Manager with the Better Business Bureau of Michigan joins us to discuss applications for the 2025 BBB Trades Scholarship.

More information can be found here: https://www.bbb.org/local/0372/bbb_mi_awards/trades

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's not every day that I get a press release
that says for immediate release and I immediately pick up
the phone for a conversation. But we did yesterday when
we learned that the BBB Trade Scholarship is now accepting applications,
because I wanted to learn more and marketing and community
relations manager, and I made the assumption that you all
did too, and I hope that assumption proves true. Katie

(00:22):
Grievous joining us again from the BBB. Thank you so
much for doing this today.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Yes, absolutely, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
So we've talked before about how there is a lack
of skilled trades and how sometimes training can be prohibitive
if it's there are some costs. But now there are scholarships.
So how does it work.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah, so the Better Business Bureau is offering this scholarship.
That money varies. But what we want is for anyone
who's entering the trades, they're twenty years or younger, they've
been hired in the last twelve months or last with
a BBB accredited business to submit an application asking for
tools or work where boots things that that are going
to help you get a leg up in your industry.

(01:03):
And we award them on a case by case basis.
But the point is to help those new employees get
that leg up, be able to go out on some
of those jobs that maybe they don't have the tools
to do yet, and not only helps them in their training,
but it helps them get that real world experience and
get it faster so that they can really have those
lucrative careers in those trades.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Katie, when you say trades too, for our audience, can
you be a little broad in the perspective of I mean,
this includes a lot of different categories.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Right, Absolutely, we're talking construction, landscaping, heating and cooling, auto repair,
even pest control, tree removal, anything like that, and we'll
even consider other trades. So anybody who works with their hands,
who's you know, maybe goes to those technical schools things
like that, we're looking for you.

Speaker 1 (01:50):
I never would have thought to start my search for
that through you, but I should have. The scholarship also
supports BBB accredited businesses, right, Yes.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
The point is to also help those accredited businesses find
those quality workers and help keep those young workers so
that they can have those lifelong careers in those industries.
We're seeing a lack of newbies coming in and staying
in those trade businesses for the long haul, and so
we want to help take that cost off those businesses,

(02:21):
take it off of those new people and create that
happy relationship and then boost the employment rate for those
companies as well.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
You'll find the link at BBB dot org and we'll
put the link in the podcast section at woodradio dot com. Katiegrivous,
marketing and community relations manager with the Better Business Bureau
of Michigan, Thank you for your time today.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Thank you so much for having me