Imagine a young man in Alaska floundering for direction and needing a break! Years ago, before he found a personal relationship with God, Rob Purvis was that guy. Little did he realize that God wanted to give him a family, a new career, and eventually an opportunity to help guys who were incarcerated in one of California’s most notorious prisons.
After a brief career as a construction laborer on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Rob returned to his home state of California to attend welding school, join the Ironworker’s Union, and begin his career as a welder. Working his way up to obtaining a Contractor’s License from the State of California, and starting Purvis Construction Welding, Inc. in 1989 with his wife, Debbie, the two of them ran a successful field welding operation for the next seven years, where they specialized in commercial construction of power plants, bridges, high-rise buildings, and seismic retrofits for Caltrans.
After ten years in the trade, he switched gears and went to work teaching the art and science of welding to convicts at Folsom State Prison. He considered it a real privilege to work with some of the men who couldn’t “read” a tape measure when they started, and after several, short years . . . paroled and immediately became employed as ironworkers, pipefitters, piledrivers, etc.
Along the way, he became involved in the American Welding Society through Section leadership and did his best to promote the values and culture of AWS, an entity he considered a “quality organization.”
Professionally, he became a CWI in 1998, attended the Leadership Symposium in 2000, Instructor’s Institute in 2002, and in 2016 secured the CWE designation, and was given both the AWS Counselor’s Award, and the Honorary Membership Award.
Currently, he is the AWS Director, for District 22, in northern California, and is extremely proud of his almost 34 years of membership: “next to my faith, marriage, children, grand-children, and fast motorcycles . . . my affiliation with the American Welding Society has been the highlight of my life!”