Welcome, Barret Gosen, to the Elpis staff, our new woodworking coordinator, who joined us at the end of April 2026.
Gosen comes to Elpis with 13 plus years of experience, having worked with at-risk youth, dating back to his days as a student at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. His experience working with at-risk youth before Elpis went across various fields of social work, from other non-profits to county probation work, crisis response, as well as housing and food insecurity.
“We would like to welcome Barret Gosen to Elpis Enterprises as the new woodworking program manager,” said Paul Ramsour, executive director of Elpis. “Barret comes to Elpis with a wealth of experience in woodworking, youth development, and customer service. We are excited about the direction of the woodworking program under Barret’s supervision.”
After starting a family, Gosen decided to take a step back from social work due to the varying hours of work, and went to St. Paul College for cabinetmaking. He found out through the cabinetmaking instructor, Tom Hillstead, about Elpis’s need for a new woodworking coordinator, and Gosen was blown away by the opportunity with Elpis.
“I was like, ‘Holy cow, there’s a non-profit, at-risk youth, woodshop position that’s too good. It doesn’t make sense, it’s perfect,’” Gosen said.
Having been an at-risk youth himself as a teenager, attending four high schools across Utah, Montana, and Minnesota, Gosen can relate to many of the experiences Elpis interns are coming from when joining the woodworking program. While he admits not all the interns will leave Elpis with the same level of passion he has for woodworking, Gosen is hopeful to give the interns the skills they need to be successful in the trade.
“I think the trades are slowly becoming a lost art, and I really like the idea of preserving that, and I really like the idea of having kids leave here with a competence that might become less and less common.”
The interns who enter the woodworking shop for the first time come with little to no experience within the trade. This provides plenty of opportunity for Gosen to not only teach these youth about a trade becoming a lost art, but use the teachable moments as time to learn where they’re at in life and see how they can open up about struggles outside of work.
“It’s an intimate thing, and there’s safety involved, and some kids have already been a bit trepidacious with, ‘This is kind of making me nervous.’ And for me to show up and say, ‘Hey, it’s going to be fine. I wouldn’t let you do something I was worried about whether or not you’re able to do it. Let me show you.’” I really like the avenues that can open up in conversation that otherwise wouldn’t have been there, like definitely not when I was a probation officer.”
Elpis is all about helping interns build confidence in their abilities so they can transition more easily into the workforce after their three-month internship. Whether they remain in a field similar to their internship is entirely up to them, but what each of the four social enterprise programs can do is provide them with the confidence to take on any task a job throws their way.
That’s one of the lessons Gosen intends to pass on to any intern he works with in the woodworking shop at Elpis. And if they’re drawn into woodworking with a passion that Gosen has grown over the years, then that’s a bonus to his work.
“If I can give any of the interns the confidence to say, ‘Hey, I think I might actually know how to take care of this. Like, oh, I think I could improve my immediate quality of life just based on what I can do with my hands.’ You regain so much control, and I think there’s just something therapeutic about, in a way, almost shutting your brain off and building something.”
