24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY november 9-15, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com relationships, and understanding from different leaders: How do you bring people together to rethink your economy, and diversify the voices at the table that can help inform what the economy can look like for the people that live and work in your region?” Kaczmarek says. “It is important that the people who are most impacted by the systemic problems be at the center of the solutions.” Systemic problems of economic inequality run deep. In Salinas, the median household income is $75,747, according to Census data. But to afford a two-bedroom rental home at market rate, $2,675/month, a household would need to earn $107,000 to avoid spending over 30 percent of income on rent. Meanwhile, according to a 2018 study, the median annual income of farmworkers in the region was just $25,000; 89 percent were renters, compared to 53 percent of the city’s population overall. Smith was hired by the Community Foundation to manage the first two years of SIEDI. During that time, news broke that Amazon was considering building a 2.9 million-square-foot warehouse with 50 loading docks in Salinas. For Smith, it became an example of a missed opportunity. “I did a quick check-in and nobody knew about it,” he says. “Why aren’t you at the table?” The Amazon proposal was eventually dropped, but for Smith it was a case study in what happens all too often in decision-making about economic development: the people who might be the ones to actually get the jobs are not included. But Smith has an example that he sees as a case study in success: Joby Aviation’s facility in Marina. “Joby jobs are much better than Amazon jobs,” he says. “There is a powerful role to be played connecting the community with good jobs. [In the case of Joby] those connections were made, and they bore fruit.” Maria Elena Manzo came from Mexico to California at age 16 to work in the fields. After moving to Salinas, she decided to get involved in the community. Her starting point was at her church, Madonna del Sasso, one of many houses of worship in the region involved in COPA, which aims to empower people to advocate effectively for themselves. Manzo became a COPA leader in 2001 and has since been involved in successful campaigns to create Esperanza Care, public health insurance for undocumented immigrants in Monterey County, and VIDA, a community health worker program. Manzo is now the director of Mujeres en Acción, which convenes small groups of women with leadership training aimed at economic self-sufficiency. Most participants are farmworkers, and many are monolingual speakers of Spanish or Mixteco. In Manzo’s mind, there was not a natural relationship between the Mujeres membership and the tech sector. Since 2018, Joby Aviation has been running its R&D out of the Marina Airport, creating electric vertical takeoff and landing machines, also known as flying cars. It felt a world away. But through SIEDI, Manzo learned about a manufacturing apprenticeship program at Joby (job opportunity!). She sent out a notification via What’sApp to current and former Mujeres participants, and they shared it with their families and friends. Interest was strong—some 100 of 220plus applications Joby received came from Mujeres-adjacent people or other SIEDI referrals. Joby ended up hiring three apprentices out of its initial 20 from the Mujeres-related applicant pool in 2022. (They are a son, a brother and a nephew of Mujeres participants—the next step is to encourage more women to apply.) One was working in the fields; one was working at a grocery store butcher counter; and one was delivering parts for a car sales company. All three completed a six-month, paid apprenticeship, and have since been hired on. Another four apprentices came via other SIEDI groups, and three are still with Joby. “The one thing they had in common,” Manzo says, “is that they said they would never apply to that position because they didn’t see themselves working in that field.” It turned out that a nudge from a trusted community organization was all they needed. For Manzo, “It really changed my perspective of the technology industry.” Instead of coming in with its own workforce from Silicon Valley, it could be an employer of local people and offer a path into good-paying jobs of the future. A SIEDI mentor encouraged Manzo to advance the relationship and meet with Joby officials. “I had never really worked with industry leaders. I said, ‘What’s my role here?’” She quickly learned from mentors: “They have the jobs that the community you serve needs.” And then she quickly learned the value of relationships. “When I met with [Joby], something happened between the two of us,” Manzo says. “They learned that there is talent in the community, and I learned there are a lot of jobs available that the community doesn’t know about. They need the workforce and the community needs the jobs, so it’s in our mutual interest.” Joby officials say the relationship has helped the local community understand and trust the aerospace industry. And it’s resulting in high-quality candidates who already live in the area. “Before this, when we posted jobs with titles like ‘hand lamination technician’ or ‘robot operator,’ local people would scroll past them on Indeed because they don’t resonate,” says Cody Cleverly, Joby’s workforce development lead. “This type of outreach allows us to connect on a personal level with folks and tell them, ‘It doesn’t matter your background. You can, if you want a career in manufacturing, apply for an apprenticeship. Look at all these transferable skills from agriculture, hospitality, or auto mechanics.’ “We are committed to creating jobs for people in the region who want to stay here and work here and have a career in aerospace.” To Manzo, SIEDI is most effective when it comes to getting people talking: “What Joby taught me is the importance of the relationship, the conversations.” People in the private sector and in government have long recognized the power of the relationship. Many community organizers and nonprofit leaders have too, but formalizing that is the vision for SIEDI. And the story of Joby Aviation is the initiative’s primary case study in how it works. State Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Merced, attended a SIEDI meeting in 2022, sat at a Mujeres en Acción table, and Manzo told her the story of the three apprentice placements. That got Caballero curious about Joby, and she scheduled a tour of the Marina facility. And that led her to becoming a champion of the advanced air mobility sector. She authored SB 800, signed into law in October, which creates an Advanced Air Mobility, Zero-Emission, and Electrification Aviation Advisory Panel with a three-year charge of mapping out air mobility infrastructure. A SIEDI conversation made Caballero into a champion of the emerging sector, says her chief of staff, Luis Quinonez, and it also gave Joby a critical tie to the community. He and Cleverly both note that not only does a local workforce already live here—a benefit in a housing-constrained region—but also that if a novel technology will succeed, it requires trust, Ken Smith was a founding member of the nonprofit COPA and has worked as a political adviser to State Sen. Anna Caballero. He created the curriculum for SIEDI’s first cohort. “The skills that made you a good activist organization may or may not translate to making you a good economic development player,” he says. His focus was on developing those skills for participants. “To build a healthy and vibrant economy, all voices need to be in the mix.”
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