Alum Profile: Elise Brown

For this month’s Alumni Spotlight, we heard from Elise Brown, who was an Apprentice from 1987-89 when the ‘Shop was in Rockport. She shares about how the skills she picked up here empowered her to take on big projects, and deepened her sense of community.

I was an apprentice in Rockport from 1987-89, then moved to nearby Liberty, and currently co-own a construction company focused on residential energy efficiency renovations. I live with my partner, Martha, in an old brick farmhouse and have two grown children.

My A’Shop experience helped me discover how to be “me”. I relish physical work and living in community, two things I valued about the A’Shop and continue to this day.

After my apprenticeship, I felt unleashed and energized to move through several rewarding life chapters, from being a member of the 1990 Atlantic Challenge Team, to building a timber frame barn and running an organic farm, to being a professional firefighter/EMT, and now running a contracting business. I don’t think I would have had such great adventures had I not been an apprentice where trying new things and persevering through adversity were so lovingly encouraged and demonstrated.

I cannot imagine not living in community. I think a hold-over from my time living on “The Land” is the various outbuilding I have built on our farm that often are inhabited by friends or folks needing temporary housing. I serve as our town’s Emergency Management Director, Budget Committee Chair, and as a volunteer ambulance driver, positions I hold so I can be deeply in relationship with my neighbors.

I also appreciate my “can-do” attitude that I think is a natural outcome of an apprenticeship. I had never before had an experience where it was assumed that I would figure out how to do something I had never previously done. We built things, fixed things, chopped down trees and split them up, lived without power, used enormous planers and bandsaws, honed our hand-tool finesse, achieved a fine eye for details. We learned through failure. Oh, the heart-ache of a plank which ultimately did not fit and had to be started anew! This can-do spirit is truly a gift: Toilet leaks? Ok, let’s replace it. Car stuck in a snowbank? We’ll twitch it out, no problem. 

As a parent of young adults, I see many young people feeling discouraged about the future, especially when they consider the challenges ahead created by climate change and social discord. My experience is that there is no better remedy for depression than being involved in a community, working in one’s physical body, and creating things of beauty and/or function and helping others. An Apprenticeshop experience encompasses all these components – let’s keep it going!