The first time Lori Tschohl walked into the Community Works shop, she felt the chill.
It was April. Brent Bellamy, the executive director, pointed to an old space heater doing its best against the cold leaking into the converted milking barn. During board meetings in the winter, Bellamy told Tschohl, older volunteers would show up and he'd hand them blankets.
Tschohl, the managing member of Eagle Pipe Heating & Air in Port Townsend, Wash., took that in.
"We can absolutely change this," she told him.
And they did.
That exchange symbolizes how Tschohl operates in Jefferson County, as a business owner and as what the people around her call a "connector." Tschohl has a habit of walking into a space, seeing what's needed, and then figuring out how to provide it, whether the currency is money, tools, time, or simply the right phone call.
"If I can't help out financially or be there as a person," she says, "they know I will connect. I will find that person."
A community that keeps its own
Jefferson County, which sits about 60 miles northwest of Seattle, has always been a place that asks something of the people who choose to stay. It is rural, coastal, and, in recent years, facing a skilled labor shortage that has made it harder to keep local dollars inside local communities.
Lizanne Coker, executive director of the Jefferson County Home Builders Association, has watched the dynamics play out for 25 years. She estimates that when a $500,000 home is built using local labor, that money turns over in the community seven times in the following four years. When workers have to come from Seattle or from south of neighboring Kitsap County, which happens more and more, those dollars leave.
"You lose more and more money and more base support," she says. "And it's beaten up this county pretty badly."
Tschohl founded Eagle Pipe in 2015, the same year she became involved with the Home Builders Association. She joined the board at Coker's invitation, and the two have worked the same problems from different angles ever since.
Their efforts converge most visibly around three organizations: Community Works, Dove House Advocacy Services, and the Chimacum Valley Tech program at Chimacum Junior/Senior High School.
Warmth as a resource
Community Works uses construction projects to teach young people hard and soft skills such as woodworking, showing up on time, working as a team. The shop operates out of a former milking barn on a 250-acre farm outside Port Townsend. Until recently, the space where volunteers and interns gathered to eat and meet was unheated.
Bellamy says that matters more than it might sound.
"Having consistency is really important" for the young adults his program serves, many of whom have struggled to find footing elsewhere. When cold weather made the space unusable, he says, "once you've started momentum and lost momentum, it's hard to regain it."
After Tschohl's visit and her offer to help, Eagle Pipe, supported by Daikin and Thermal Supply, donated and installed a heating and cooling unit in the Community Works gathering space. When Bellamy received the donation, he got a little emotional.
"I'm feeling incredibly grateful and fortunate," he said, "for this generosity from Eagle Pipe."
Tschohl had seen something similar happen at Dove House, a domestic violence shelter and advocacy center in Port Townsend that also operates the Recovery Cafe. The free community gathering space offers meals four days a week and a place for people healing from trauma to find community.
Beulah Kingsolver, the executive director, describes a building that was sweltering in summer and cold in the winter when Dove House first opened the cafe. Kitchen staff worked surrounded by fans, but the heat prompted limitations in the menu.
"We contacted our local heating supply company, Eagle Pipe and Heating, and they came in, gave us a bid," Kingsolver says. "We now have a system that keeps it very warm in the winter and very cold in the summers."
Kingsolver notes that the connection between Eagle Pipe and Dove House has deepened over the years. At one point, an Eagle Pipe employee needed Dove House's services.
"And then we built a partnership," Kingsolver says. "Lori and her company have sponsored Dove House in our golf tournament financially. They've golfed. They've shown up when I've had plumbing or heating issues at any of my three buildings."
She pauses.
"I know how to do social services," Kingsolver says. "But I don't know how to do heating. So I call Lori, and she sends her people over, and that just makes life so much better."
Building the next generation
The third aspect of Tschohl's community engagement involves the next generation of tradespeople directly.
Chimacum Valley Tech is a construction program, the first of its kind in Jefferson County in more than 15 years, at the junior and senior high school. Daniel Evans, the program's teacher, launched it this year with three full periods a day — students learning woodworking and building trades in a proper shop.
The connection between the school and the community runs deep by design. Evans says most of what the students build goes back out into the community — shelters for an animal rescue, lending libraries for a food pantry, a hygiene station for Dove House's Recovery Cafe.
"Everything we try to do, we try to have it ripple into the community," Evans says. "And likewise, that comes back to our program."
Eagle Pipe visits the school for what Evans calls "occupation exploration." Tschohl and others go in and talk to students about the trades, giving them a picture of what the work looks like and what it can offer. Community Works sends an apprentice to spend time in the classroom three to four hours a day, five days a week, helping Evans and giving students a model of where the path leads.
Evans describes success, 10 years from now, in terms that sound a lot like Lori Tschohl's story: students who made it in the trades, going back to pour into the program that gave them a start.
"I go out in the community and I run into some past students," he says, "and they are working in the trades. They say they're having the time of their life. They're buying a house."
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Showing up
For Tschohl, none of this feels like philanthropy in the abstract. It feels like showing up.
She has served on the board of Habitat for Humanity. She is past president of Women in HVACR. She helped the Builders Association secure grants from the Building Industry Association of Washington that have gone to trades programs and scholarships across the county.
When a customer once called Eagle Pipe to schedule service, he explained how he found them: He had gone to his garage, reached into his golf bag from a charity tournament, and seen the Eagle Pipe name on a piece of swag Tschohl had donated.
"If you're going to donate to that organization," the customer told her, "I know you're a great company."
Tschohl laughs at the memory.
She describes giving time to events, to meetings, to job sites, as more important than writing a check, though she writes those, too. The Power the Nation campaign in partnership with ServiceTitan, she says, gave Eagle Pipe the ability to boost what it was already doing.
"I already give time and financial," Tschohl says. "Now I can really boost not only the individuals that I have been supporting all along, I can boost that financial contribution even higher."
In Jefferson County, the trades have always been the connective tissue of the community. Eagle Pipe is making sure the connection is growing stronger.
