is a nonprofit corporation that benefits all Nebraskans by helping inmates gain job skills and become productive citizens while building affordable, energy-efficient housing for our communities.
• Prairie Gold Homes is a collaborative effort between Prairie Gold Housing, Inc., Lincoln, NE, a non-profit Corporation and the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
• The Corporation is made up of a Board of Directors, an Executive Director and a Construction Manager.
• The goal of PGH is to provide quality, affordable, low-maintenance, energy-efficient homes for qualifying citizens of the state of Nebraska via modular and on-site builds, and to provide employment and job training for approved inmates resulting in development/enhancement of job skills, thus reducing recidivism.
• Students will be exclusively from the Work Ethic Center (WEC) in McCook. Interested inmates must complete an application, must have received an acceptable score on their Test of Basic Adult Education (T.A.B.E.) exam and possibly must meet other criteria, outlined by the Department of Corrections and WEC Administrative Staff.
• The PGH class will be approximately 10 weeks, with the beginning portions academia related to construction & construction safety, followed by actual construction of a single-family home.
• During a typical class term, students will experience most, if not all the steps to building a home, from the ground-up. This includes, but is not limited to basement installation, framing, flooring, siding, roofing and interior finish work. Students are also allowed to assist with electrical, plumbing and HVAC work in many cases.
• In addition to earning construction skills that can be used in the workforce, once they are released, each student is also required to attend a 10-hour OSHA class, along with a First-Aid and AED certification class. These certifications are extremely valuable assets when interviewing with potential employers in the future.
• Students that successfully complete the 10-week class, will then attend a 2-week Life Skills class, which offers them critical skills, such as resume preparation, interviewing and computer use. Upon graduation, the students receive a certificate as Pre-Apprentice Carpenter from HBI (Home Builder's Institute), a nationally recognized organization.
• In addition to teaching valuable skills, our class enables the inmates, albeit brief, a few hours outside the correctional facility to feel “normal” again.
• Prairie Gold Homes has a less than 1% recidivism rate, based on past students. This is our ultimate goal and mission; to assist these men in gaining employable skills and hopefully molding them to become productive citizens and to never return to the correctional system.
