Around the beginning of the pandemic, Dan Hoffman, CEO of the nonprofit Invest Nebraska, noticed two things. One is that Nebraska, like many other Midwestern agriculture states, had historically low unemployment rates largely due to decreasing population. And second, compared to the rest of the country, Nebraska had a higher than normal number of middle and high school kids who participated in robotics competitions.
When the Biden administration announced the Build Back Better Regional Challenge—granting a monumental $1B to regional economic development projects—Invest Nebraska pitched its idea: developing advanced robots to use in the agriculture industry. The project would accomplish two main goals based on Hoffman’s observations.
“The historical strategy of trying to increase your population is either by immigration or by birth,” Hoffman says. “Those two are running up against the realities of Midwestern states. One of the other solutions to all this is automation.”
The other goal centered on education. What happens to all those kids and teenagers who participate in robotics competitions after they graduate high school? Hoffman saw an opportunity to build better pathways to good jobs for them.
The Big Idea: Invest Nebraska was among 21 grantees awarded up to $65M through the challenge. The parameters of the competition were intentionally flexible, allowing regions to decide what they needed most to spur economic development. Investments ran the gamut from robotics and advanced manufacturing to the automotive industry to Indigenous finance and green energy. The ambition was big—as were the funds to match it.
“(Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo) wanted to do basically two things: galvanize economic development across the country and provide significant resources in one fell swoop,” says Scott Andes, former program lead for the Build Back Better Regional Challenge. “The average EDA award over the last several decades is about $2M. Our minimum award was $25M.”
“The goal of this program was to do a generation worth of economic development in five years.”
Since winning a $25M grant from the challenge and creating the Heartland Robotics Cluster, Invest Nebraska has partnered with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to create a new robotics engineering curriculum for undergraduates. For younger kids, Metropolitan Community College hosts after school robotics camps for middle and high schoolers to get them interested and learning skills from a young age.
For those already working in the agriculture industry, the Nebraska Manufacturing Extension Partnership is teaching private-sector entities about new advancements in ag technology and how to operate things like robots and 3D printers.
The Power of Partnerships
The Build Back Better Regional Challenge was created through the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, alongside other economic development programs like the Good Jobs Challenge. The next year, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, creating the Tech Hubs Program and investing in semiconductor manufacturing, and the Inflation Reduction Act that invested in domestic green energy production, among other things.
New Model: Programs focusing on economic mobility typically fall under the auspices of the labor and education departments, but for these programs, the Department of Commerce and the Economic Development Administration were heavily involved. What’s unique about these programs is their attempt to combine regional economic development with personal economic mobility. (For an in-depth look at the potentially lasting legacy of that push, read this companion article.)
Ben Pratt, senior vice president of business investment at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, part of the grant winning Southwestern Pennsylvania New Economy Collaborative, says regional economic development and access to a skilled workforce must go hand-in-hand for their project focused on robotics and automation to work. Local employers have been hesitant to innovate their processes and procedures without knowing there are workers with the right skills available, he says.
So far, the effort to combine regional economic development with economic mobility appears to be paying off for the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, as well as the Good Jobs Challenge, a similar program that doled out $500M in grants to help 50K Americans break into jobs that were both in-demand and could sustain a family.
Lauren Starks, the first program lead for the Good Jobs Challenge, says both programs emphasize the importance of public-private partnerships to aid in the immediate economic recovery in the wake of the pandemic, as well as setting up infrastructure for long-term growth.
“The interest from my perspective in coming into workforce policy was really about the power of partnerships and how bridges can be created to ensure that workers have pathways to good jobs,” Starks says. “The programs have reached Americans all over the country and in so many different types of communities.”
Break Outs: One Build Back Better project that stands out is the ACT Now Coalition in West Virginia, which received a $62.8M grant. As of last September, the coalition has trained more than 300 workers for jobs in solar project development—an alternative to jobs in coal mining that traditionally dominated the region.
“We’re talking about one of the poorest places in the country, one of the hardest places to get training to really work, and I would put them toe to toe with almost any other training program in the country,” Andes says.
Another promising project is the New Orleans-based H2theFuture, which received $50M to close the cost gap between producing green hydrogen and other forms of hydrogen that rely on fossil fuels. The coalition has so far begun construction on a new hub for clean energy and climate technologies, created internships and educational programs in green energy at four HBCUs, and helped create 4K new jobs in clean energy.
One key to success across all projects is the high level of collaboration among different organizations—universities, community colleges, venture capital firms, city governments, and more. Part of that reason is the amount of money that was put on the table.
“Even after the money is delivered, New Orleans is a great example because it’s a fairly decentralized, Balkanized place in terms of having lots of different institutions,” Andes says. “When it comes to green hydrogen and the workforce, I’ve never seen universities come to the table in the way that they are.”
In Nebraska, Hoffman has seen the same thing. Northeast Community College, located in rural Nebraska, has partnered with the Nebraska Innovation Studio in Lincoln to develop a tech work space near the college, so students don’t have to drive two hours to a city. Metropolitan Community College in Omaha is investing in urban agriculture using hydroponic farming systems in old freight containers, called “Freight Farms.” The University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Engineering and the agriculture college are partnering with NASA to research agriculture in space.
“These relationships are starting to develop because of the Heartland Robotics Cluster,” Hoffman says.
An Uncertain Future
It may take 20 or 30 years to see how the investments from the Build Back Better Regional Challenge fully play out. Whether the incoming Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress keep the federal investment coming is unclear. So the different coalitions are looking for other sources of funding—and often finding it from states, foundations, and other sources.
Invest Nebraska is doing the same. Hoffman is hopeful the Build Back Better Regional Challenge will continue in some form, noting that the Obama administration’s regional innovation cluster initiatives continued after he was out of office. Republican lawmakers, however, have repeatedly threatened to roll back legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, despite the fact that it has created hundreds of thousands of jobs, particularly benefitting Republican-leaning states.
One glimmer of hope is in the Good Jobs Challenge, which yesterday announced recipients of its second round of funding. Eight grantees will receive a total of $25M—significantly less than the original $500M. The goal is to place 3K more Americans into good jobs.
For now, Andes remains optimistic.
“I’m hoping that we changed people’s perspective on what ‘good’ looks like,” he says. “‘Good’ might cost a lot of money, and we can afford it as a federal government.”
But big investments, he says, aren’t without risk. And he does worry about how support for the overall approach might shift if some projects don’t pan out. “What will change all this is if we get one or two massive failures. You can’t understand how relieved and happy I am that there have not been any in the first two and a half years.”