••• SPONSORED SECTION •••
Education, economic development and workforce development efforts, orchestrated by NC East Alliance,
are embarking on new and promising paths toward a prosperous future for the residents and businesses of
29 counties.
Click on the titles for story links:
• Who we are – Letter from Vann Rogerson
• Economic and Community Development
• STEM East
• Hidden and Lost Talent
Who we are
On the surface, NC East Alliance’s 29-county region in the central and northeastern parts of Eastern North Carolina has some of the most attractive and vibrant beaches and sound communities in the country. We also have thriving larger communities, such as Greenville, Wilson and Jacksonville, and growing industry clusters such as biopharma, aerospace MRO, boat building, healthcare, smart agriculture and smart manufacturing, among other highly technical industry sectors. We are the birthplace of a great deal of North Carolina’s deep-seeded culture and history. Our region is home to 1.3 million residents and 227 cities that vary from explosive growth to persistent poverty, and everything in between.
Statistics bear out that 20 of our counties are experiencing long term moderate to severe population loss, as well as a rapidly aging population. While nine counties are prospering, more than a third —10 — suffer from persistent poverty. It is a tale of extremes. These issues throughout much of the NC East territory negatively affect and have the potential to limit, the growth and prosperity of the entire region. This includes limiting our rapid-growth counties by restraining their critical labor sheds. That is where our work really begins.
In 2020-2021 the leadership and board of directors of the NC East Alliance decided to minimize our previous singular focus on traditional industry, recruitment-based economic development. We devised strategies to create a new regional foundational infrastructure development strategy and no longer try to lead the growth of the region by leaning solely on recruitment of new companies. Instead, we created a new regional economic health model with a major focus on a robust talent development and retention network, among other critical interconnected foundational pieces.
The new mission evolved for the purpose of redefining our Rural Economic Development model, because the old models were simply not working. We are implementing a broad-based approach to address the full spectrum of economic challenges that restrain rural Eastern North Carolina from seeing its full potential. Our places that are suffering did not get to that stage overnight, and the turnaround may be equally slow. But if a turnaround does not begin, the long-term outcomes will be devastating, and we cannot remain on that current downward demographic pathway in our region.
Several of our state legislators, particularly Sen. Bobby Hanig of District 1, our northeastern corner counties, saw our vision. They agreed that what we were planning was desperately needed in most of our region. In 2023, the legislature decided to fund our efforts in what was a major infusion of resources that allowed us to sprint forward with our plans. That support also opened many doors to others who wanted to jump in and help. Our task is large. It is going to be expensive. With partners, such as the state legislature, ECU Health, the BelleJAR Foundation and others, we are free to test our suppositions and see what is going to work where.
Our counties vary wildly in population, general wealth and overall capacity. The new model focuses on five areas of economic health and connectivity of efforts: Education and our STEM East network, Economic Development (existing industries and recruitment), Community Development, Marketing, and Hidden & Lost Talent (folks who may have slipped through the cracks, or who need help returning to the workforce). We are focusing on developing field operations for each of these initiatives throughout the entire 29-country region that will reach down into the smallest places. Via this network, we hope to identify and address shortcomings, capacity deficits and challenges of numerous types to help those who want to help our people and places flourish.
While we don’t have the capacity or funding to save all our troubled places, we can be great teammates and partners in a very difficult struggle. We can build a vehicle capable of bringing customized stepped-up capacity plans to all of our partners. We often say that our job is to bring efficacy, efficiency and added horsepower for those who are trying their best to serve their communities.
An example of our field operations is education: Our STEM East team has 30 K-12 school systems and 15 community colleges that are paying members of our education consortium. We employ a large team of education industry experts, including a former local community college president and six former local school superintendents. They know the shortcomings and are working to fill gaps, particularly in some of our lower-capacity school systems. This team acts in a very entrepreneurial fashion, and they are seeking to design stepped-up practices at a higher level than some systems are equipped to do on their own
We act as a force multiplier for these partners.
That is at the heart of our model across all five of our initiatives.
Our education efforts are aimed at preparing teachers to
be the point of the spear, a special set of economic developers. They are the first to clearly explain pathways to our future workforce and point them toward optimal local career opportunities, with the blessings and guidance of local
industry partners.
This summer we will have 14 industry cluster multiday workshops throughout the region that will join with local community colleges and industry partners to educate local K-12 teachers on what these numerous careers and pathways might look like. Each workshop will host 35 teachers. These are popular summer programs and fill up quickly. Regrettably, we’ve had to turn away several hundred teachers, but we will be increasing our capacity in the future.
“We have seven industry clusters, with two more developing and in the planning stages,” says Bruce Middleton, our executive director of STEM East. “We are looking across the region, at what the needs are, and it’s bringing awareness that these clusters exist and how the students’ future careers can be found in one of these operations.” We believe that through education and customized workforce training we can prepare for future job markets, reduce out migration, support small and rural communities and showcase our part of the state as a great place to learn, work, grow and do business. It will even help us attract new businesses because of this special workforce development infrastructure that will serve our existing industries so well.
“Everything we do in the education realm centers around informing and connecting our students, and adult learners, to the opportunities that exist right here, where they live” says Chairman of the Board Todd Edwards. “We are concerned with shortcomings in all the areas of work that we have taken on and how they interconnect to build toward healthy communities, and strong motivated populations within those communities. We have a lot of work to do, and it is a different formula from county to county, throughout our region”.
In Economic Development, our support at NC East is impacting many less-populated counties individually. We are helping them find their niche, whether in luring big companies or smaller, localized businesses. We focus on making sure existing businesses are primed for success. Donna Phillips, our vice president of economic development, has plans for even the smallest places in our region, saying, “The No. 1purpose for economic development is to assist our 29-county region in creating new jobs and a tax base for these communities and making it a better place to live. That’s it in a nutshell.” And she is not looking past any community with her efforts.
We often hear accounts regarding talented potential workers who may have gone unnoticed or had their road to meaningful employment take a detour, for one reason or another. NC East is planning a network of mentorship and skill training programs that can be a tool in helping to address this issue. We are developing plans and pathways to help unemployed youth who are no longer in school, formerly incarcerated individuals and veterans returning to civilian life, among other groups. This is our Hidden & Lost Talent initiative.
In seeking success in this arena, and pathways for those seeking careers, we support our industries’ desire to connect with students, teachers, adult learners and others within their entire labor sheds. In the past, they traditionally have turned to the community college and K-12 schools in the one county where they are domiciled. But if a large company has a 15- or 20-county labor shed, its pipeline would include eight or 10 community colleges and a dozen or more K-12 school systems. That is where we come in, to build such networks and consortiums. We also are looking to some non-traditional paths to find people our local employers so desperately need.
“Our Hidden & Lost Talent initiative all ties into workforce development,” says Mark Hamblin, NC East chief operating officer. “I think Eastern North Carolina has the most amazing potential, and I want the people who live here to see the opportunities that exist. We want these people to understand that they can go out and blaze their own trail and take advantage of the growth that’s to come here in the East.”
Infrastructure often is portrayed as providing of water lines, or construction of highways. We view our citizens and their preparedness for, and connectivity to, future jobs as our greatest asset, our workforce infrastructure. Some of our best and brightest often go off to college, or move on to the big city, without any effort to recruit them or connect them to golden opportunities all around where they grew up. It is critical that we stop, or slow, that talent bleed.
Along those lines, we are in the process of adding a focus on marketing our region, promoting the cool stuff we manufacture and the places and people that make living here special. The unique aspects of life that can only be found in a place like Eastern North Carolina must be put on a pedestal for all to see and appreciate. We must put our best foot forward and let the world know that we are here and that we are pretty darn great! After all, if our young people don’t see Eastern North Carolina as a place where they can advance and want to build a life, then all our other connectivity efforts become a waste of time and money.
Much like what is unfolding in our Education, Industry Connectivity, Marketing and Hidden & Lost Talent focus areas, we must improve on the sense of place in all of our communities. They must become or remain as places where upwardly mobile people want to live. The bar for success will vary widely depending on what part the East you’re in. Our Community Development initiative is critical to this work. Our places that are growing must be constantly pushed to maintain their improvement models. Places that are relatively healthy, but may be bordering on stagnation, must be encouraged and led to take the next steps toward consistent transformational improvement. Places that are floundering need partners to help them stop the slide. Each plan is different. Stop-the-slide plans are the hardest to develop and implement, but when they succeed, our energy and resources can then be turned toward plans to flourish.
Our Community Development Vice President Bianca Shoneman is offering data-driven tools to help counties with microgrants, lifestyle campaigns, community improvement models and branding. She also will offer strategic collaborations with neighboring counties within our five initiatives. It’s a movement to redefine what rural success looks like.
We currently are building a county membership model. It is similar to the framework of our STEM East membership network of 30 K-12 schools and 15 community colleges. Once that consortium is completely assembled, we can fully leverage the power of 29 counties and 1.3 million people working together on specific goals of a broadly healthy and robust region. We are seeking to bring capacity where little to none exists and multiply that capacity even further where it is already plentiful. That is the goal!
We believe all of rural North Carolina should adopt this model. This is a unique, rural regional transformation framework not found on this scale, or depth of reach, anywhere else in the country. We are garnering unprecedented levels of attention for what we
are building.
While attending a funding conference in January, representatives of Tesla heard about STEM East and our NC East Alliance. They were so impressed that they invited our team to Reno, Nevada, last May to visit their Giga factory manufacturing facility and a nearby training facility. They wanted to open the door to sharing ideas. That is just one example of our teams playing on very different ballfields and working together, rather
than alone.
Back in July 2023, Greg Payne, director, secretary and treasurer of the BelleJAR Foundation in San Francisco, presented NC East with the first annual check for a four-year, $1.6 million grant to support STEM East. He saw our potential. Greg said, “I work in 40 states, and you are unique in the United States. There are no other groups integrating and coordinating efforts the way NC East is.”
In all we do, we are constantly impressed with the way our teams and community partners are working together to make a positive impact on the communities that we serve. We are building and fortifying education, community development, economic growth and workforce development, reaching into every sector of our territory as one dynamic force for change. And we’re doing it together. It is meaningful, frustrating and often the most fun we have ever had in our professional careers, all rolled up into one great big pile of little victories that is growing larger by the day here in Eastern North Carolina!
Sincerely,
Vann Rogerson
President/CEO
NC East Alliance
STEM East Network
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