“I learned right alongside the kids that we’ve worked with.”

Bill Nimke is the founder and executive director of All Hands Boatworks, a Milwaukee nonprofit dedicated to inspiring children through the art of boat building. Nimke, a former middle and high school English teacher, continued his passion for helping children learn by creating the nonprofit 11 years ago. So far, he estimates that the organization has worked with over 6,000 children throughout metro-Milwaukee. All Hands Boatworks’ workshop was one of the many buildings to open its doors to the public during Open Doors Milwaukee.

Colton Pemble: What inspired you to start this?

Bill Nimke: I had the good fortune to visit some other similar youth programs around the country and I was blown away by some of the success that kids were having in working together, learning. Not only in hands or tools skills but also practicing math, learning more about science, and then using these boats that they were building, and as a teacher, found these boat building projects to be endlessly instructive. I knew that there was nothing like this going on in the Milwaukee area and I contacted a few teacher friends of mine and just offered to see if we could lead a couple boat builds and to see how the students would respond. And it has grown ever since then.

Colton Pemble: And how did you get into carpentry?

Bill Nimke: You know, in all honesty when we started All Hands Boatworks, I didn’t know very much more than the sixth or seventh graders we were working with. I was fortunate to grow up in a family where my grandfather was a carpenter, my father was a mechanical engineer, but I was not formally trained, did very little woodworking growing up, but I learned right alongside the kids that we’ve worked with.

Colton Pemble: So is this the original location, or where did you start out?

Bill Nimke: So we’ve been in this location now for just about five years. It’s our true home. Before that, we did not have a shop space to call our own, or office space, and just the place, building, facility has worked out really well to meet our needs. We have about 8,600 square feet total. We can support six to eight boat building projects going on simultaneously.

Colton Pemble: How long does a typical project take you?

Bill Nimke: Typical boat building projects can range anywhere from 20 to 30 hours, to two to 300 hours.

Colton Pemble: What made you decide on boats specifically?

Bill Nimke: First of all, working with wood as a material is fantastic because there’s nothing we can’t do to that material that can’t be repaired, fixed or replaced. And for young people who perhaps have a fear of failure, that they’re going to make a mistake, it’s a big breakthrough moment when they realize that these wooden boats we’re building, no matter what happens, we can learn from whatever mistakes we make, and repair them.