Meet The MBTI Team: Tanya Palson
September 25, 2020
Creating the Manitoba Building Trades Institute (MBTI) has been an all hands on deck effort, with many members of our team taking on new positions and responsibilities in the process. Having played a key role in establishing Manitoba Building Trades’ brand over the last two years, MBTI’s Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives – Tanya Palson – felt it was important for MBTI to have its own identity as a lasting institution, rather than a side project.
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“Developing a new brand strategy from scratch was an all-encompassing effort including naming considerations, logo design, identity guidelines, and web design,” says Palson. “I wanted MBTI to embody Manitoba Building Trades history and the spirit of our skilled trades affiliate locals while capturing where we are going with the new institute and all the possibility this initiative entails.”
With the construction of the new educational training centre, MBTI will now have the physical space to foster more intensive programs and offer meaningful partnerships with organizations in the community who share similar goals – An opportunity which Palson looks forward to exploring.
“We’ve been hard at work reaching out to the community, industry, and educators not only to inform but more importantly, to start establishing relationships and partnerships. In the past decade MBT has become strategically focused on increasing our community participation and lending our voice to the issues we care about. Our initiatives for work-force development, especially in pre-apprenticeship trades awareness and preparation are going to be industry leading.”
Palson says she also believes the new programs falling under MBTI’s commitment to sustainability will be especially beneficial to future generations of students.
“Our aquaponics greenhouse is the first facility of its kind in Canada to cater to high-school students. Increasing access to knowledge of sustainability agriculture and food production in our youth is a critical factor in our societies ability to battle food scarcity, as well as fight climate change.”
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Tanya’s message to current MBT members, future skilled trades workers, and apprentices in Manitoba:
Everything we’ve done to get MBTI off the ground has been with the intention of creating a home base for our skilled trades workers in Manitoba. I hope that you come to see MBTI as your own place, and that you are proud of everything we do to build and promote the unionized skilled trades in Manitoba.
It’s frustrating to see stigma still exists around skilled trades work, and careers in the skilled trades when the pure scale and coordination of all the trades working together is nothing short of remarkable. Each time I set foot on a construction site, including our own MBTI site, I’m reminded of the skill and hard work that all our members put out into Manitoba on a daily basis.
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