MILAN, Italy — At the American School of Milan (ASM), a student woodworking club called ASM Woodworkers has turned discarded shipping pallets into garden beds and furniture. Its model of building with reclaimed wood instead of new lumber points to something much larger. In Kenya, South Africa and Italy, vocational carpentry programs use that same hands-on approach not to save materials, but to move young people out of poverty and into steady work.
A Club Built on Reclaimed Wood
ASM Woodworkers has completed most of its projects using upcycled pallets. Around 85% of the club’s builds rely on reclaimed wood, according to co-founders Leonardo Schmidt and Changmin Ha. Their first major project, the Groundwork Garden Bed, used 12 upcycled pallets and grew out of a partnership with the school’s Environmental Systems and Societies program to expand campus biodiversity. Schmidt and Ha compared their sorting process to that of Ocean Patrol, an organization that separates shoreline waste by type before reuse, saying ASM Woodworkers applies the same principle to its pallet supply. Materials thrown away “are not necessarily useless,” they said, and through their projects, students have come to see that firsthand.
ASM Woodworkers operates inside a well-resourced international school, so the wood it saves matters mainly for the environment. In the communities below, the same trade skills carry a very different weight: the difference between finding work and not.
Vocational Training Reduces Poverty in Kenya
In rural western Kenya, that gap is measurable. Youth unemployment in rural areas reached 17.3% in 2020, compared with 13.8% in cities, according to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics data. Researchers link the imbalance to a steady migration of young people toward cities that cannot absorb them, a cycle tied to overcrowding, poverty and child malnutrition back home.
The Sauti Kuu Foundation is trying to interrupt that cycle where it starts. Its vocational training project in Siaya and Kisumu counties, funded by the German government through the Chamber of Skilled Crafts Hannover, gives rural youth a year of orientation across eight trades, including carpentry and joinery, before they choose a specialization, according to Sauti Kuu Foundation. The project targets 160 disadvantaged youth completing that orientation, with 70% expected to move into full vocational training and a similar share reporting that the program prepared them for the job market, according to Sauti Kuu Foundation. The model treats carpentry not as a craft but as a deliberate entry point into Kenya’s formal skilled trades.
Vocational Training Creates Jobs in South Africa
Cape Town’s Cape Flats were built by policy, not geography. Under the apartheid-era Group Areas Act of 1950, the area was designated for non-white residents forced out of other parts of the city, and it now holds roughly 450,000 people in a district still marked by overcrowding, unemployment and violence, according to Pioneers Post. “It is really a tale of two cities,” then-provincial minister for community safety Albert Fritz told The Guardian, contrasting tourist-friendly central Cape Town with the Flats just miles away.
Paul Talliard knows that contrast firsthand. A former fireman, Talliard lost years to drug addiction before rebuilding his life through a homeless charity, and he later founded Hands of Honour, a social enterprise that employs rehabilitated addicts and homeless residents to upcycle donated goods into furniture and early learning tools, according to Pioneers Post. Hands of Honour now employs 14 people and draws in up to 50 volunteers during busy periods, giving men who came through the program a path back to steady income and, for some, a role as mentors to younger residents in the community.
Skills Training Supports Refugees in Italy
Youth unemployment in Italy stood at about 18% in early 2026, among the higher rates in the European Union, a burden that falls hardest on migrants and refugees, who also contend with language barriers and unfamiliarity with the job market. A 2023 study in the journal Merits found that vocational training measurably raises youth employment odds and cuts reliance on informal job searching, with the strongest gains in regions where the labor market already struggles most.
In Turin, the Salesian Vocational Training Center Rebaudengo has worked to close that gap for refugees living at a Red Cross-run camp in Settimo Torinese. The center’s technical training program, run through the CNOS-FAP Salesian training network, partners with the Biella Industrial Union, which reviews graduates and connects them with companies willing to hire them, while the Red Cross covers transport costs and monitors attendance, according to ReliefWeb. All but one of the 15 refugees in the program’s most recent cohort found employment afterward, with organizers crediting the strong outcome to high motivation among participants.
A Shared Lesson in Resourcefulness
ASM Woodworkers turns pallets into garden beds because it is good for the environment. In Kenya, South Africa and Italy, vocational carpentry does something more urgent: it turns a shortage of formal jobs into a path toward one. The research backs up what these programs show on the ground, that structured, hands-on training measurably improves the odds that a young person finds steady work. Student woodworking projects may start as a lesson in patience and craft, but for a much larger number of young people worldwide, the same skills are the difference between poverty and a paycheck.
– Nay Mohamad
Nay is based in Milan, Italy and focuses on Business and Good News for The Borgen Project.
Photo: Pexels