The Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) today announced it is joining the Lowe’s Foundation’s Building Futures Skilled Trades Coalition, a national effort bringing together organizations from across the skilled trades ecosystem to help train and develop 1 million people for skilled trades careers by 2035.

For CCRI, the issue is particularly important because it aligns with our mission to deliver workforce programs that directly fuel Rhode Island’s economy and meet its critical labor demands. By joining the coalition, CCRI will bring its experience and perspective to the table alongside educators, workforce organizations and other industry leaders working to identify shared challenges and scale solutions that are already working.

As the largest cross-sector skilled trades coalition, the initiative brings together over 75 educators, businesses, workforce organizations, and corporate leaders, including NVIDIA, AT&T, Bank of America, Carrier, General Motors, DEWALT, and Duke Energy. This unified alliance will focus on three core areas: changing the perceptions of careers in the skilled trades, scaling proven training and credentialing solutions, and collectively measuring progress from training to employment.

The Building Futures Skilled Trades Coalition draws on the proven track record of the Lowe's Foundation to scale tangible solutions. Its Gable Grants program, which launched in 2023, outpaced initial performance metrics and has since grown into an ecosystem of 73 community colleges and nonprofits scaling innovative skilled trades training programs across 30 states. The successful outcomes of this program led the foundation to recently expand its mission to train and develop 250,000 tradespeople by 2035.

"The next industrial revolution won't be built by algorithms alone. It will be built by the millions of skilled trade professionals who power, connect and move this country forward," said Marvin Ellison, Lowe's chairman and CEO. "For nearly four years, our foundation's sole focus has been helping thousands of people enter the skilled trades by investing in America's most innovative workforce training programs. Today through this coalition, we are answering the call from hundreds of existing partners to lead an even larger unified national effort that will redefine what's possible when leaders from different sectors rally behind a common purpose."

CCRI’s participation in the coalition builds upon a strong existing partnership with the Lowe's Foundation, which awarded the college a $1 million Gable Grant in July 2025 to fuel a major expansion of its skilled trades career pathways. This funding directly supported the expansion of CCRI’s Electrical Apprenticeship and Ready to Build programs, the establishment of two state-of-the-art electrical lab spaces to increase enrollment capacity, and the development of a new Construction Management degree and certificate program.

Backed by this funding, CCRI's Ready to Build program -- a 10-week training course designed to prepare individuals for registered apprenticeships in the construction trades -- successfully outfitted classrooms with new tools and safety equipment to accelerate training. Many graduates from the expanded cohorts successfully transitioned into the workforce, securing both union construction registered apprenticeships and non-union roles