Kristen Hurley
Executive Director, ACE Mentor Program of Greater Boston
Industry experience: Over 20 years
Alejandro Miranda
Co-chair, ACE Greater Boston Fundraiser
Industry experience: 17 years
ACE Mentor Program of Greater Boston has new leadership in its 17th year of providing a pipeline of entry-level talent into the local architecture, construction and engineering industries. Kristen Hurley was recently named executive director of the nonprofit following a five-year stint as chief strategy officer at Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology. ACE Mentor this month began its summer internship program pairing local high school students with industry firms. The organization also sponsors a 15-week after-school mentorship program, in which 130 students participated in the past school year, pairing with executives at local firms. Alejandro Miranda co-chairs the organization’s annual fundraiser and is a director of project development at Boston-based Boylston Properties. The fundraising has enabled the group to award nearly $1.5 million in college scholarships to 242 high school seniors.
Q: What’s the history of the ACE Mentor program’s Boston chapter and how has the programming evolved since its founding in 2007?
Miranda: The Boston chapter was founded by a few local firms including Gilbane Building Co., Turner Construction and a few of the architecture firms who saw an opportunity in this market to support the growth of the industry. We have seen a need for women, people of color and a greater diverse set of contractors, architects and engineers, and an opportunity for kids who may now know these industries are out there. It’s grown substantially and in both its student outreach, participating students, fundraisers, scholarships awarded, mentors and mentees and participating firms.
Q: How does your background at Franklin Cummings Tech mesh with the ACE Mentor Program’s focus?
Hurley: I was Franklin Cummings Tech’s chief strategy officer, so I set up a lot of industry partnerships, managed the strategic planning and also did a lot of fundraising for the college. Also, the college does have a construction management program and that is an area that ACE is focusing on with Trade Day. It’s a very similar industry composition, and it was a great fit.
Q: What are ACE Mentor Program’s key sources of funding, and what are the needs for fundraising?
Miranda: Our primary source is the annual fundraiser. One of the things that is interesting is all of the people that touch these industries, and that was helpful to raise $550,000 this year to operate the program and offer recurring scholarships with our students. We’ve had a few large grants: the Cummings Foundation grant is $150,000 over three years. Kristen joins us with the intent to diversify our funding sources, and grow the ones that we have. We are in a position where we serve 250 students a year. We need to grow the internship program and encourage these kids to come in and get exposure in specific firms. The trades in this city, particularly in a booming construction economy, continue to see a lack of bodies. We would like to be a source for kids who don’t want to go to college.
Hurley: Our mentorship program runs one day a week from October through March and basically it meets in six different locations. Thanks to COVID, it does have a remote presence now for one cohort. Each volunteer team does an interdisciplinary design project, such as a subway station renovation. For the scholarship presentation, we invite industry professionals, parents, teachers and mentees and have students present the projects to the folks in the room and compete on the national level with other ACE affiliates.
Q: How does the program address the unmet needs within the member industries?
Miranda: What’s really important is the diversity of thought that comes from working with folks from different economic backgrounds. At the end of the day, you’re working with folks in the community and the fabric of the built environment. We take that seriously. There is an increasing lack of young people getting into the business and a lot of focus on technology. One of the things we are seeing a lot of tangentially is [tech] folks are in high demand in our business. There’s a lot of quantitative modeling and matches for those skillsets.
Hurley: Students have to work together. Every company you’re going to work with, you have to communicate and work as a team. Beyond the tech skill sets, it’s teaching human skills.
Q: What are the plans for new programs to reflect what the industries’ say are most-needed roles?
Miranda: One piece we want to increase is our Trade Day. We need to connect with trade groups to push this very unique opportunity to expose what they do on a daily basis to these kids. Word of mouth is the way we grow this program, and Trade Day allows us to do that.
Hurley: One of the good things is we did go virtual during COVID, and we have kept one virtual cohort, so it allows us to reach more students. There are a lot of roles in the clean energy industry such as HVAC technicians, and it is a focus of the state for folks to have more training opportunities in those sectors.
Q: How does the program measure its impacts?
Miranda: This is something we can work better on, but we track students attending colleges and utilizing scholarships. We’ve got a life cycle of kids who have gone onto college and come back to mentor and give back to the same program. We want to spread the word to anyone who thinks the program would be a good fit. We’ve been flexible to adapt to other locations [beyond Boston]. We’ve had kids from Leominster who came in once a week and did a hybrid schedule. We want to have a framework where we can expose more kids to this and make it grow.
Hurley’s Five Favorite TV Shows:
- Criminal Minds
- Friends
- Yellowstone
- Mad Men
- Sex in the City
Miranda’s Five Favorite Road Trip Songs
- “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
- “Runnin’ Down a Dream” by Tom Petty
- “Can’t You See” by Marshall Tucker Band)
- “All Right Now” by Free
- “Life in The Fast Lane” by The Eagles
