What UMA Has Done in 2020

For all of us, these past seven months have been a blur of pivoting, responding, and charting a new path. At UMA, we’ve been proudly lifting up the work of the organizations that are building more equitable communities through manufacturing careers, entrepreneurship, and ownership. COVID has reinforced that manufacturing is necessary to support local economies and resiliency efforts — something UMA and our members have believed and championed for a long time. But as our communities face losses in tax revenue, decreases in job openings, and increasingly vacant properties, we believe it’s time to double down on our collective investment in manufacturing as an inclusive economic development strategy. Over the next few months, we’ll be diving further into these kinds of strategies with our network — from local branding organizations to capital providers and workforce development practitioners — all through the lens of racial equity.

In the meantime, we wanted to give you a sense of some of our more recent engagements and opportunities to connect with us in the weeks ahead.

Looking forward:

• On September 16th, we will be presenting at the Kauffman Foundation’s ESHIP Summit, focusing on “Building a Manufacturing Ecosystem: The Role of Local Branding Organizations in COVID Response.” We will give a primer on what a Local Branding Organization is, contextualized with stories of cities leveraging this work as an equitable economic development strategy in this COVID era.
• On September 22nd, in partnership with LISC, UMA is hosting a webinar, “Frontline Economic Development Responders: How Community-Based Lenders Can Preserve Neighborhood Manufacturing Businesses.” Our panel will be discussing how lenders are deploying flexible capital and supportive technical assistance programs to help small businesses, particularly makers and manufacturers of color — both before and during COVID.
• On September 30th, UMA is co-hosting our Industry & Inclusion program’s next webinar, in partnership with The Century Foundation: “Explicitly Centering Racial Equity in your Workforce Training Organization.” Panelists will explore ways in which people of color can build wealth through opportunities in manufacturing — from entry level careers with pathways to management, and ownership, and entrepreneurship — all starting from a place-based manufacturing workforce organization.
• Finally, UMA has been invited to sit on two advisory boards this fall: one convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) on cultivating STEMM workforce strategies that are responsive our needs in the midst of this pandemic, and the other by the University of North Carolina about how Manufacturing Extension Partnership Centers have responded to their constituencies of mid-sized manufacturers.

Looking back across the past year, we’ve been reflecting on moments when we were able to convene in person, and the many recent opportunities to meet up virtually. Here are some highlights:

• In September 2019, Lee Wellington, UMA’s Founding Executive Director, traveled to Berlin to speak on a panel, “Renaissance of the City as an Industrial Location” at the Berlin Urban Tech Summit. There, they discussed key topics including location factors and potentials, sustainable ideas for logistics in urban neighborhoods, and opportunities for additive manufacturing in urban spaces.

• From September through December 2019, Katy Stanton, UMA’s Programming and Operations Director, was selected to participate alongside Shimmy Technologies in Acumen’s “Future of Work” Accelerator. Together with Shimmy’s Founder, Sarah Krasley, they won the peer-judged accelerator competition — a $50,000 investment in Shimmy’s Upskill Platform, which helps reskill garment workers to digital production technologies.

• In late 2019, UMA launched our two cohort programs, Pathways to Patient Capital and Industry & Inclusion — each working with place-based organizations that are centering racial equity within their areas of work: capital access and workforce development. Don’t miss our two reports from those learning communities: “Forging Fairness: How community-based lenders are centering both inclusion and manufacturing to promote equity” and “Racial Equity and Advancing the Future of Manufacturing.”
• Last month, UMA co-hosted a conversation around manufacturing as an equity strategy with Forward Cities in their “Promising Practices” series. For that webinar, “The Role of Manufacturing in Small Business Growth,” we were joined by UMA members Mountain BizWorks, Manufacturing Renaissance, and Made in DC, who explained how their programs around capital access, workforce, and local branding harness the power of manufacturing for equitable community growth. You can watch that webinar here.

• We also curated and presented on a number of other panels, including Interise’s “Solve It” conference in March talking about “Patient Capital Models for Diverse, Small-Scale Manufacturers;” InBIA’s ICBI34 Conference back in June, on their virtual panel, “Supporting Modern Industrial Businesses;” and the American Craft Council’s Forum on Craft Thinking, acknowledging the ways makers are digging deep to build a more resilient and equitable craft ecosystem.

It’s your work that inspires and connects us to each other, and demonstrates the power of manufacturing as a strategy to promote wealth creation, inclusive communities, and racial equity. We’re so grateful for your leadership.

In partnership,
The UMA Team