CCWBE Report

Our new Research and Instructional Design Project Coordinator, Pauline Lake, will join our team on January 16, 2024. We are extremely excited to have Pauline who brings extensive project management experience, an exceptional history of producing high quality research and writing, and a strong desire to help underserved communities thrive. Pauline’s primary responsibilities include updating our Early Warning manual as the source document for creating our training curriculum and designing and implementing an effective multi-media interactive learning experience for participants. She will also play an administrative staff role assisting the Advisory Committee to seamlessly perform its duties. Finally, Pauline will assist the senior team with overall project implementation including workshop coordination, and outreach and recruitment. Filling this position will add significant capacity to our team allowing us to achieve our goals much more quickly as we can now fully operationalize our implementation plan. Our second priority this period was to finalize the specific roles and expectations for the project advisory committee whose main function is to assist with the editing and publishing of the manual, inform training design, to assist with stakeholder outreach and participant recruitment, and to help ensure that the training is effective towards achieving our goals. The advisory committee is finalized and consists of five individuals who each reflect what we believe are critical aspects of the manufacturing and community development ecosystem to ensure that we are able to build a comprehensive model. The first full committee meeting was changed from December 13 to January 17, 2024. The committee will meet monthly and play an instrumental role in revising and updating the Early Warning Manual, creating the training curriculum, and beginning the outreach and recruitment to identify stakeholders interested in receiving Early Warning training. Although we got a late start, we expect to begin training by April of 2024. Senior staff continues to attend the HUB and convening meetings and we also continue to connect with other members of the social economy eco-system in Chicagoland and across the country. In our November report we shared that we hosted a very successful information session on manufacturing ownership succession which was attended by over 80 people from the financial and investment industries, community development organizations, Black, brown, women and worker entrepreneurs, manufacturers and government officials. Fueled by the overwhelming interest by the attendees in ownership conversion opportunities our volunteer team is creating a unique system that convenes company sellers who express a concern for community development and job retention to targeted buyers (especially the BIPOC population) and skilled consultants and service providers. When fully operational, our Early Warning System will help inform our owner network with a community economic development option to consider—a third way—as they are preparing to sell their companies. Our team believes the approach we are developing can dramatically increase the number of Black, Brown, workers and women positioned to become owners. Experts suggest that over 1,000 owners will be selling their companies in the next 3-10 years which suggests that our approach, if fully implemented, could save hundreds of jobs and continue to provide an economic engine in their communities.

We did not experience any significant constraints or limitations but we are still learning the vouchering process.

We were invited to participate in an initial discussion with Ravinia Capital, LLC, CIBC bank and the US Department of Commerce on jointly hosting a major event around ownership succession and exports in mid-summer.

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5 extremely useful