I ask why Young Women Creating Change appealed to her. "What drew me to the project was the opportunity to attain these skills," Joy says. "Women aren't encouraged to... I've always liked working with my lands." When I comment on her respect for Brenna's situation, Joy tells me that "working with women is different. We're a support group for each other ... it's incredible, learning these skills and communicating on an equal level and having this support for one another." joy's face grows animated as we talk. It's obvious she loves the work she is doing.

I admire the bench we are sitting on. It's solid and comfortable, with arm rests and slight tilt to its back. It smells strongly and pleasantly of cedar, imported from a sustainable woodlot near Nanaimo on the island. “I helped build it,” she says triumphantly, “yay!”

“Yeah, the bench,” chortles Britt, the project carpenter, when we sit down for our interview after Joy goes back to work. In her aviator sunglasses, muscles from years of labor and her baseball cap, Britt is formidable but not intimidating. The sun is out now, and Britt selects a rice-flour peanut ball from my bag of sweets. “We call it the Transformer Bench, because it looks like it could transformer into something else at any minute.”

Britt thinks she currently runs the only all-woman construction company in Vancouver, although she used to know of two others that "disappeared" over the past few years. Through her company, Green Handywoman, she employs several women each summer for contract work. One of them, who she has been training over the past four years, stays on each winter. A current Green Handywoman contract is to construct a Japanese garden for a house on Hawks Avenue, only four blocks from where we now sit. Britt has had to temporarily shift between her company interests and the interests of the training project. And after having spent the last four years doing construction work in Vancouver and ten years before that acquiring construction skills at sites around the world, Britt feels she's more into the teaching aspect of the profession than the physical now. It was this facet of the YWCC project she was drawn to.