olunteers are critical to the mission of AGC chapters, for helping us with understanding member needs and helping to best serve them,” Associated General Contractor, or AGC, of Alaska Executive Director Alicia Amberg said at the AGC’s annual Dinner Dance gala in November, before announcing the recipient of the Stan Smith Volunteer of the Year award. “They are important as support for our staff as we prepare projects, plan events, and grow membership.”
Volunteer of the Year award winner Chris Duty, a project manager with Hamilton Construction Company’s Alaska Division, has embraced that “mission critical” attitude since first becoming an AGC member in 2010. As a student at Oregon State University, Duty joined the school’s AGC student chapter as a freshman representative and worked his way through the officer ranks, ending his senior year on a high note as president.
“My senior year, we started the first high school chapter in AGC,” he says. “We won national recognition for that.”
His commitment to AGC continued when he joined Hamilton Construction Company as a project engineer in 2015. Hamilton has divisions in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, and Mountain West (serving Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho), and Duty spent time in both the company’s Oregon and Colorado offices, becoming heavily involved in the AGC’s Construction Leadership Councils, or CLCs, before coming to Alaska in 2020.
“I ended up out in Colorado for a couple years and got heavily involved in their CLC,” Duty says. “An opportunity became available for me to come up here, and I moved up to Alaska. I wanted to get involved in their CLC, and that’s led to a whole bunch of other opportunities.”
Amberg told dinner dance attendees that Duty’s dedication to and involvement with AGC has “really stepped up” in recent years.
“He is always willing to provide valuable feedback on issues affecting contractors in a constructive manner, highlighting the smaller contractor perspective in AGC’s advocacy efforts,” she said. “[He has] become increasingly active in AGC’s legislative efforts and helps promote our industry priorities with legislators by participating in our Legislative Fly-In and Legislative Affairs Committee. [He has] been instrumental in bolstering relations between contractors and our DOT partners, helping to establish best practices and guidelines for effective partnership between agency and industry.”
Duty credits Hamilton Construction for his ability to be so heavily involved in AGC.
“Fortunately, I have a company that’s very strong in the AGC Oregon-Columbia chapter at a national level, and they support us heavily to be involved,” he says. “So, I’ve got a company behind me that is really active in AGC.”
And he’s gotten as much from his membership as he’s given back.
“Thank you so much,” he said when accepting the award. “This organization is awesome [and] I appreciate everything I’ve learned, from Oregon to Colorado and especially Alaska. I’ve found home here.”