Creating & Preserving Urban Industrial Space: Policy Toolkit Release & Discussion

As we’ve moved together as a community over the past three months, facing a worldwide pandemic, economic uncertainty, and racial justice uprisings, one thing has remained constant: the desire for deeper connectivity, despite our distance.

Since the start of the pandemic, UMA has been convening our Communities of Practice and cohort programs; connecting with many members individually; and mapping out ways that we, as an organization and network, can continue to build momentum around the importance of supporting manufacturing as a wealth-building and equity strategy for our communities.

To those ends, in this newsletter you’ll find:

• An invitation to our policy discussion and toolkit release, “Creating & Preserving Urban Industrial Space,” out of our Land Use & Real Estate Community of Practice. In partnership with the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development (ANHD), we will be highlighting the work of industrial developers now and pre-COVID, as we share our learnings and inform the industrial policy conversation at this crucial moment.
• Three profiles of the Association for Black Economic Power, Boston Ujima Project, and Bridgeway Capital from our recently released “Forging Fairness” Report out of our Pathways to Patient Capital cohort. These are stories from community-based lenders who are intentionally creating financial products and programs to serve makers and manufacturers of color.
• A few other things we’ve been doing — including signing onto the American Sustainable Business Council’s “Confront Racism!” letter and co-sponsoring their upcoming discussion, and educating ourselves through UMA member and partners’ programs about how COVID-19 exacerbated inequality issues. You can read more below.

We know the power of UMA is you, our members, and during this time we’re working to provide opportunities to lift up what you’re doing and build a stronger practitioner network.

In collaboration,
The UMA Team

Creating & Preserving Urban Industrial Space: Policy Toolkit Release & Discussion

One of the many crystalizing facts the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare is the devastating fragmentation of and disinvestment in the United States’ manufacturing sector. Municipal governments are scrambling to source personal protective equipment (PPE); manufacturing companies are rapidly retooling their factory floors; and we are all wondering how to move forward from the health and economic crisis brought on by COVID-19.

Over the past year, UMA and ANHD have been engaging industrial policy stakeholders across the country to derive best practices for creating and preserving affordable industrial real estate, culminating in the upcoming release of our Mission Driven Industrial Development Toolkit.

Today, as manufacturing is being touted as a mechanism to support our economic rebound and public health, our findings, which emphasize the importance of collaboration between manufacturers, community organizations, developers, and government to inform development, business services, and land use policies, are more relevant than ever before. As we have always known, the manufacturing sector holds a source of employment for the middle class and those without a college degree, and the promise to lift up local economies and neighborhoods. Most notably, it presents a path out of the current public health and economic crisis.

We are excited to share these learnings and to inform the industrial policy conversation in cities across the country at this crucial moment. Please join us as our panel discusses the critical importance of bringing together stakeholders from across the policy and geographic landscape to support manufacturing.

Our panelists include Leah Archibald, executive director of Evergreen in Brooklyn; Hannah Jones, director of economic development at Industrial Council of Northwest Chicago; and Andrew Dahlgren, researcher at UMA. Our facilitator will be Armando Moritz-Chapelliquen, director of capacity building for ANHD, and we will hear opening remarks from Barika Williams, executive director of ANHD, and Lee Wellington, executive director of UMA.

We hope you can join us!

UMA Event & Reading Recommendations

• Led by the American Sustainable Business Council, we are proud to have signed onto their “Confront Racism!” letter, and we encourage you to do so. Tomorrow, we are co-sponsoring a discussion about concrete business actions to assure equal protection for every American.
• We will also be attending The Century Foundation and Center for American Progress’ webinar, “Racism and Inequality in the Face of COVID-19,” happening on Wednesday. This webinar will feature a discussion between Danyelle Solomon, vice president, race and ethnicity policy at the Center for American Progress; Joia Crear-Perry, founder and president at the National Birth Equity Collaborative; Derrick Beetso, general counsel at the National Congress of American Indians; and Jamila Taylor, director of health care reform and senior fellow at The Century Foundation.

• We recommend listening to this discussion with Angela Glover Blackwell, the Founder in Residence at PolicyLink, hosted by Design Core Detroit. Their discussion centers on how COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality issues as well as how everyone benefits when we implement solutions for our most vulnerable populations. PolicyLink has helped grow and define a national equity movement focused on innovating and improving public policy to ensure access and opportunity for all low-income people and communities of color. We are proud to have members from both of these organizations as part of the UMA network.