Constance Spencer

A Bit About Our History

Originally from Canada, I moved down to the states when I was accepted in the architecture school at Miami where I completed my undergraduate degree a year early with a semester at Cornell and was fortunate to be offered a position at Yale in their Masters in Architecture program. During the required First Year Building Project, I stayed on to work the summer as a carpenter. Then when I moved to Vancouver I began to do design-build residential construction as well as opening my own architectural practice. After a few years I came back east to Toronto where I joined a mid-size firm as a partner and eventually moved to the Carolinas with my family on a recommendation by my professor and started my own practice there, Spencer Architect, which has given me and my children a very good living!

In my new home I began volunteering with the South End Development Committee, Women in Construction, and in my SC community with the school, the city boards and sports teams since I was now a single mother to four children in those systems. I headed up food distribution in shelters, clothing and furniture donations for refugees, theater outings for children, tutoring, coral events and career days at the schools. Then I realized that there had to be areas of even worse need across the world and I joined KOP & YASC to work in marginal communities in Kenya, Mexico, the DR, Nicaragua, and China where I often led up to 150 volunteers in programs that provided medical clinics, public health, teaching, sports, business consulting, construction and music. I took my children with me through much of this and we all contributed to projects that empowered women, educated children, supported villages, and improved lives.  

This effort felt good! I witnessed women become bold after seeing the female volunteers example, and some told me they had started their own domestic violence group and others wanted to use our power tools. I saw a woman bending rebar on a job site, girls playing baseball in a field they previously didn't frequent and women banding together to build a latrine for a poverty stricken family. This was inspiring and once my children left for college I picked up my pace and either led my own programs or joined IVHQ for environmental and social justice oriented projects in Costa Rica, Peru, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Croatia, and Belize. It was important work that changed the lives of so many more people but my life was changed the most. I began to travel even more until I had experienced 121 countries and island states, and helped in other ways, distributing laptops, school uniforms, eye glasses, clothing, and books. I even sponsored refugees from Nicaragua to come live in my house and endowed a scholarship for women at the Yale School of Architecture.

I have won awards and many wonderful thanks for this work, which is appreciated, but I became more interested in helping an even greater number of women. So I designed my own class for the Yale Global Scholar Program for students called "The Art of Giving Back". I lectured on it and wrote social justice articles in the Huffington Post, published the book "A Site Visit" and researched and edited "Women verses Women: The Case for Co-operation". I went back to college and earned an ALM in Sustainability from Harvard and during all of this I started to recognize a phenomenon - women were moving into construction jobs right before my eyes. In the skilled trades they could make about 94.7% of what men make compared to 77.9% in the professions or business. So I have established this Foundation, bringing together so many talented, clever and dedicated people I have worked with along the way, to help single mothers, women in marginal areas, young women and old, get into a sustainable field that could transform their lives and their communities, as it did for me! 

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