Engineering and building community hope

By Emma Peterson.

Learn how the PSMJ’s Fund is restoring communities after disasters.

Recently, headlines seem to constantly be alerting viewers to a new natural disaster. It can be overwhelming and somewhat discouraging. But it is also a challenge to come together to help communities recover and rebuild. That’s a challenge that PSMJ and METALCON Founder and CEO Frank A. Stasiowski, FAIA has definitely risen to meet. In a new episode of MetalCast, Karen Edwards sat down with Frank to talk to him about the PSMJ Disaster Rebuilding Fund.

This fund is over two decades old now. Frank shared a bit about what inspired him to start it, saying, “Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and myself and my wife were sitting down one day looking at all the films and all the videos on August 29, 2005. It was a major disaster, it's the biggest storm to ever hit America.” So, the couple began to try and figure out what they could do to help. And what they realized is that they had a mailing list of 165,000 firms, contacts, customers and exhibitors that they could bring together to make positive change. Frank explained, “What we did is form a 501C3, a not-for-profit charitable organization with a very succinct purpose and vision — we needed to help a community rebuild its public spaces, something that would benefit the community in a way long after the storm was forgotten, something nobody else was doing.” And so Frank and his wife raised a few million dollars from their network and built the Bay St. Louis Community Center.

Today, the Bay St. Louis Community Center is still a community hub and the PSMJ Disaster Rebuilding Fund is still helping communities around the nation. Frank shared, “Given the disasters in both North Carolina, the hurricane, and in California with the fires, we've reignited our efforts to raise funds and we're doing very well. Just the other day we got another check in for $10,000 from an engineering firm and we're doing small and large fundraising to put together a fund to help both of those communities.” In North Carolina, their focus is a library in Asheville and in California they are working in Altadena.

Read the transcript, Listen to the episode or Watch the full recording for more about the PSMJ Disaster Rebuilding Fund and their work.