Why we built this

I put off writing this one for a while. A first newsletter is meant to introduce an organization, and I would rather just talk to you, so that is what this is going to be.

The moment came after the golf tournament. Amy and the kids were asleep, it was seven in the morning, we were a hundred miles outside Dickinson, North Dakota, and it was the first silence I'd had to process what had happened and what we had built. I put my AirPods in and it all came at once: the suicide interventions, the late nights, the fights about logo colors and governance, the board meetings, the six hour virtual seminars where we laid the groundwork for the council, the talk at Utah AGC's safety conference, the suicide prevention week panel at ASU, teaching grad students about people dying and the families that suffer instead of about OSHA, the webinars, the savings we spent getting here. Kids and moms and dads and foremen and exec VPs, and families that might stay together because of what we created. And we had just raised a hundred and thirty thousand dollars with one of the premier builders in America.

Who actually made this

Builders, superintendents, safety directors, counselors, researchers, and a lot of spouses who kept dinner warm while it happened. To date nobody has drawn a salary to build what you are looking at, and that is thousands of hours by now. That part is going to change, and it should.

Some of them have buried somebody. Most have sat up with somebody who nearly was. That is not a line you put on a website, and it is the reason any of this is worth a damn. Everything we make gets checked against people who have actually lived the thing before it goes anywhere near a jobsite.

What we are actually trying to do

The short version is that we want a person who builds things for a living to get to have a whole life. Not a wellness program. A life. Sleep, money that works, a marriage that survives the schedule, and somewhere to put it when it gets heavy.

That turns into three things we are building at once.

Retreats for the families left behind, because when somebody in the trades dies by suicide the people who are still here get a casserole and a funeral and then silence. The first one is in Pagosa Springs next June.

Regional crisis response teams, starting in Milwaukee this fall, so that when a company has the worst day it will ever have there is somebody to call who has done it before and knows what happens next.

And a standard that says plainly what a company owes the people who build for it. That one is the slowest and it is the one that outlives us, because a standard can go into a prequalification package, and once it is in the bid it stops being a thing decent owners choose and starts being a condition of the work.

Rebar is the part that fits in your pocket

It went live on the eleventh of August. It is free, it is in English, Spanish and Arabic, and everything a person puts into it stays on their own phone. We cannot look anybody up and neither can their employer.

That cost us something real. Our numbers come out coarser than a normal app's and we undercount on purpose. We took the trade because people only tell the truth when nothing is being kept, and a number built on people saying what you want to hear is worth nothing to anybody, least of all to the person answering.

What you can do with this

Nothing, if now is not the time. This will keep.

If you want to put Rebar in front of a crew, reply and I will send the QR codes and a toolbox-talk script. If you are looking at it for a company, there is a page at rebar.getbuilt.org/for-employers that shows what churn and injury already cost you and does not pretend to know what we have not measured yet.

And if you just want to talk, reply to this. It comes to me and I read them.