Elizabeth Wambui bio box
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2024 Outstanding Women in Business
Outstanding Women in Business: Wambui is building a more equitable construction industry
Photo | Matt Wright
Elizabeth Wambui, director of diversity, inclusion, and community impact at Fontaine Bros.
A graduate of Worcester’s North High School and College of the Holy Cross, Elizabeth Wambui’s career has seen her give back to the region where she grew up, while wearing a wide variety of hats.
After working at the American Red Cross, Wambui later moved on to the Nativity School of Worcester, where she spent about five years helping the tuition-free Jesuit middle school cultivate relationships with local businesses and foundations and implement a comprehensive fundraising strategy.
In the summer of 2021, Wambui made a daring leap into the corporate world by joining the Fontaine Bros., a fourth-generation, family-owned business based in Springfield with a growing Worcester office. Wambui became Fontaine’s first director of diversity, inclusion, and impact in the company’s 91-year history.
“She has a real impact across the region and beyond in creating career opportunities in the construction industry for the next generation of tradespeople including women, veterans, and people of color,” said David Fontaine, CEO of Fontaine Bros.
Wambui’s experience with relationship building is put to good use at Fontaine Bros., where her duties include ensuring the company meets its own workforce diversity standards while seeking out minority- and woman-owned business enterprises to ensure compliance with bid requirements. These can be difficult to meet, with a limited number of certified MBEs and WBEs in Massachusetts.
“At first, I was definitely scared, because I knew nothing of the corporate space,” Wambui said. “But I finally decided to move forward with it, and it’s been awesome. Like anything else, relationship building is huge.”
These initiatives have paid dividends, ensuring the company’s projects are reflective of the communities they operate in and opening paths into the field for people traditionally left out of the construction industry, Wambui said.
“Equity is progressing,” she said. “When you see not just municipalities but higher education institutions and anchor institutions like hospitals that ensure real attention is being paid to make sure that if they are doing a project, big or small, that they are paying attention [to equity.] It’s a priority, and that's encouraging.”
Part of Wambui’s responsibilities include organizing tours of projects for youth. This provides her with a platform to show the next generation of potential industry employees the realities of modern construction sites, where new technology is being introduced all the time.
“It’s really important to show them the construction process as much as possible,” she said, “We’re using all sorts of construction technologies, so they can see how that works and how we use it in real time. It helps dispel myths they might have.”
A well-experienced fundraiser for organizations like the Red Cross and Nativity School, Wambui was the perfect person to help Fontaine Bros. launch its own platform for giving.
Announced in 2022, The Fontaine Community Foundation was formed with the goal of leveraging the business connections to make a positive impact, with a particular focus on education and affordable healthcare access. The foundation had $128,000 in revenue and $75,600 in assets at the end of that founding year, according to Internal Revenue Service filings.
With Wambui at the helm, The Fontaine Community Foundation has raised hundreds of thousands to support local and regional nonprofits in the time since its inception, said Fontaine.
The foundation includes a staff-giving initiative, where Fontaine Bros. employees can recommend an organization they are working with or they see doing good in the community, with the foundation then giving that organization a grant in the employee’s honor.
In just three years with Fontaine Bros., Wambui has already made a significant impact at the company, with even bigger hopes for the future.
"Liz has already played an important role at Fontaine Bros.,” Fontaine said. “She is going to continue to have an impact for years to come.”
Eric Casey is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the manufacturing and real estate industries.
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