Our Mission:
Girls Build® is a non-profit organization based in Portland, OR, inspiring curiosity and confidence in girls through the world of building.
The problem is real. Women represent less than 4% of the U.S. construction trades workforce. Not because they lack ability — but because most girls are sorted away from these careers before they ever have a chance to try them.
We intervene at the moment it matters most. Through hands-on summer camps and year-round workshops, we teach girls ages 8–15 carpentry, electrical, plumbing, roofing, welding, auto mechanics, and more — led entirely by women who do this work for a living.
Our programming intentionally reaches those facing the greatest barriers: girls in foster care, girls of color, and girls from low-income households — those with the least exposure to trades education and the most to gain from career pathways that don’t require a four-year degree.
Girls Build isn’t a carpentry class with an equity rider. It is a youth development organization whose curriculum happens to involve power tools — a model designed to change who enters the workforce.
In 2025, Girls Build served 600+ girls across Oregon — most leaving with the skills and confidence to see themselves in the trades for the first time.
This isn’t just camp. It’s an economic intervention.
By the time most girls are old enough to choose a career, the choosing is already done. A thousand small signals — who shows up in trade school brochures, who works the job sites, what subjects get steered toward girls and away from them — have already done their sorting.
The result: by middle school, most girls have already absorbed the message that this work isn’t for them — not because of ability, but because the invitation was never sent.
And that gap comes with a price tag.
Construction trades pay a mean of $25.18 per hour in Oregon, with benefits including health insurance, retirement, and union apprenticeship pathways. The jobs most available to young women without specialized training pay between $14.88 and $17.25 per hour — typically without benefits. That gap, compounded over a 40-year career, is the difference between renting and owning. Between financial fragility and generational wealth.
Trades careers pay $10–12 more per hour than the jobs most accessible to young women without specialized training. Over a 40-year career, that gap compounds into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime earnings — the difference between financial instability and economic mobility.
Girls Build intervenes before the sorting happens — reaching girls ages 8–15, during the developmental window when career identities are most open and malleable. Before high school. Before the tracks narrow. Before the invitation is ever extended.
Our Impact
Growing and growing! From our first year of 60 girls to now close to 500 a summer, we continue teaching and building confidence! Expanding from our Summer Camps, we are moving into after-school programming at our warehouse so we can continue educating girls and women all year long!
5000
Girls LEarning to Build Since 2016
Since our beginning in 2016 we have taught nearly 5,000 girls through our summer camp and after school programming.
1800+
Scholarships Awarded
Because of the generosity of our donors we have been able to award partial or full scholarships to over 1800 youth.
220+
Foster Youth Served Free
Through our foster care program, over 220 foster care kids have attended camp for FREE!
<4%
Women in U.S. construction trades
— the number we exist to change
Your gift is a long-term investment in a girl’s economic future.
Most Girls Build campers attend on full or partial scholarship. Every girl in Oregon’s foster care system attends free — every program, every summer, no exceptions.
The trades pay family-sustaining wages. They offer job security, benefits, and career pathways that don’t require a four-year degree. And they’re 96% male — not because women can’t do the work, but because girls were never shown the door.
Your donation changes that. One girl at a time, one tool at a time.
Girls Who Build
Girls Who Build features candid and arresting photographs of forty-five girls showing off their power tools and can-do attitudes. Accompanying each girl is a profile interview where she speaks to her inspirations and favorite builds, plus tips for others starting out.
Our Programs
Two ways to build. One reason it matters.
The solution isn’t waiting for the workforce to change — it’s building the pipeline earlier, starting with girls who are still young enough to believe the door is open.
Summer Camps —Ages 8-15
Nine camps. Five days. Twenty workshops. One week that can open a door that was never supposed to be open to her.
WORKSHOPS & CLASSES—Year-Round
After-school workshops run November through May at our Portland warehouse — small groups, hands-on projects, women-led instruction.
We’re not teaching 9-year-olds to be carpenters. We’re changing what they believe is possible for themselves — at the exact moment those beliefs are being formed.
“Building makes me feel like I can do whatever I want, because I can do whatever I want. I can be creative in my own way, and I can just do anything.""
— Gabii, 8
Why Ages 8–15? Because the Window Closes.
You can tell a 16-year-old that women can be electricians.
Or you can hand a 10-year-old a wire stripper and let her figure out a circuit herself.
The second one rewires something that a poster never can.
No one says it out loud. But by their teens, girls have already been steered—nudged by a thousand signals toward one future, and away from another.
The reasons for that gap aren’t biological. They’re structural and social.
Girls Build intervenes before that message takes hold.
At 8 or 10, a girl hasn’t yet fully internalized the idea that construction isn’t for her. That window of openness is genuinely precious — and it narrows.
Construction and trades work is STEM in action: it teaches the laws of physics, spatial relationships, and cause and effect. It develops critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, perseverance, and collaboration. It grows minds that are curious, capable, and confident.
A girl who builds something real, with her own hands, at nine years old doesn’t just learn a skill. She learns something about herself that no one can take back — and she carries “I am someone who builds things” into the tracks-narrowing years of middle and high school with a very different internal compass.
Our History
Girls Build started with one carpenter who was tired of being the only woman in the room — and decided to do something about it before the next generation had the same experience.
Founder Katie Hughes — a licensed carpenter who also holds a degree in social work — spent years on Oregon job sites where women were the exception, not the rule. Her trade expertise meant she could teach the work authentically. Her grounding in youth development and trauma-informed practice meant she understood how to reach girls who had been told — explicitly or implicitly — that spaces like this weren’t for them.
In 2016, she began teaching girls the skills she’d spent a career acquiring. What started as two weeks of camp for 60 Portland girls became nine camps across Oregon, serving nearly 500 girls each summer.
That growth was not driven by marketing. It was driven by word of mouth — families telling families, girls recruiting girls, and a community that keeps coming back.