Plant aims to build new future

Plant aims to build new future
Congregants launch robotics training, facility
Trista Bonds talks with robotics apprentice Thomas Phelps. Bonds sees a path to salvation in modern industry. (Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune )
By Manya Brachear Pashman Chicago Tribune
Trista Bonds, a robotics engineer, once felt a twinge of guilt for helping companies replace factory workers with machines. Living on Chicago's South Side, where industries have come and gone, she saw the debilitating effects of unemployment firsthand — drug abuse, poverty and crime.
So when the pastor of Bonds' 20,000-member congregation asked people in the pews to help empower the community, she embarked on a 10-year journey of recompense.
Last week, Bonds and other members of Apostolic Church of God in the Woodlawn neighborhood opened a manufacturing plant on the campus of Chicago State University on the Far South Side, staffed by 25 newly trained and certified apprentices.
The social enterprise, dubbed BSD Industries — Building Self Determination — last month began training an additional 40-plus students to hire at its own factory or help place in manufacturing jobs elsewhere.
"There's so much opportunity here for everyone who wants it — everyone who is willing to get down in the trenches and fight for it," said Bonds, who moved to Chicago in 2004 and joined Apostolic three years later. She believes that preparing people for modern industry is a path to salvation for downtrodden neighborhoods and their residents.
While the plant — which manufactures plastic forks, knives and spoons — provides a future in plastics, it also gives trainees hands-on experience in robotics to help them land jobs in factories across the country. The education is free.
"I have a passion for industrialization," said Bonds, pointing to the Industrial Revolution as a turning point for the nation. "I think it's the way to empower communities."
Demand for the program was evident from the start. When the church last year offered the first 40 training slots to people in the pews, 196 candidates applied. Since then, 25 have graduated and started their apprenticeships. Another 40 started robotics courses last month that will eventually prepare them to do computer-assisted design, program software and run machinery. The program hopes to produce up to 120 professionals a year.
Bonds credits her pastor, the Rev. Byron Brazier, for bringing the project to fruition.
The church backed the initiative by giving $100,000 to the Arthur M. Brazier Foundation, the factory's owner. It also received $500,000 from JPMorgan Chase & Co. as part of a three-year initiative to invest in the city's struggling South and West sides.
The Chicago Housing Authority also provided a $2 million grant to assist with job training and development for residents and voucher holders, as a way to "help them on their road to self-sufficiency," a CHA spokesman said.
"BSD industries is a win-win — it will provide critical job skills training for today while supporting a strong future for manufacturing on the South Side of Chicago," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement.
Brazier also recruited an initial customer base to help turn a profit in the first year. Registered as an LC3, the tax code for social enterprises that redistribute their profits, BSD appeals to socially conscious companies and institutions, Brazier said. Customers include the University of Chicago.
Brazier said the enterprise is also looking into a new product line to help meet its social investment goals through 2019.
By the end of 2018, Brazier said, BSD intends to give more than $2 million to five elementary schools and one high school in Woodlawn and to fully fund the safety initiative of 1Woodlawn, the pastor's communitywide effort to redevelop the neighborhood.
The 1Woodlawn effort is the sequel to a development effort started by Brazier's father, Bishop Arthur Brazier, who, along with other developers in the 1990s, purchased properties along 63rd Street at a discount with the intention of building new housing and spurring retail development. The housing market crash largely halted that effort. Many of the parcels serve as church parking lots.
Over the years, Apostolic also expanded its church on 63rd Street and Dorchester Avenue to accommodate its growing membership.
But after his father retired in 2008, the Rev. Brazier announced a different approach from the pulpit.
"I wasn't going to invest in any more buildings. I was going to invest in people," Brazier said.
For Bonds, the shift coincided with her own reassessment of her priorities.
"I always kept God in my life and I always put him at the forefront," she said, "so whatever decisions and whatever directions I go in, I always try to make sure it's directed and guided by my faith."
She came to Chicago in 2004; among her employers was Grantek Systems Integration, which specializes in optimizing manufacturing operations.
While visiting a plant in Michigan to learn about a new kind of robotics technology, she asked the technicians where they got their training.
They pointed her to Focus: Hope in Detroit, an initiative launched by a priest and a nun after the 1967 riots that provides job training and jobs in one of the city's most blighted neighborhoods. She imagined a similar endeavor would work in Chicago and heard Brazier's declaration as an invitation to pitch the idea.
"Its origination takes place from people of faith who have a desire to support others that find themselves in difficult situations," Brazier said. "There are things we can do that have looked impossible ... that are being done at this time."
Wesley Mack, 54, grew up in the Englewood neighborhood. He considers himself lucky to have escaped the neighborhood and built a lucrative career in construction. But he also fought a drug addiction.
A Narcotics Anonymous meeting led him to Apostolic 17 years ago, he said. He returned the following Sunday and has been sitting in the same front pew ever since. Not long after he was seriously injured on a job site, the church announced BSD was accepting applications. He saw an opportunity to make a change for himself, but also for those he left behind. He hopes to return to Englewood and recruit others to give it a try.
"It's a chance to start over," he said. "They're trying to show the people in the neighborhood I grew up in (that) it's another way. A lot of people got stuck there. Hopefully I can give them another chance."
mbrachear@chicagotribune.com
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