Matthew Tuerk

That experience helped us understand how to, as a city, return to federal grants.

Right after we were awarded that Safe Streets grant, the Economic Development Administration announced its ReCompete pilot project.

And it was focused on areas that were, I think this was June of 2023, it was focused on areas that had a high prime age employment gap.

And so prime age employment gap is people between the ages of 25 to 54.

Prime age employment gap is people who are either unemployed at higher than average rates or out of the labor force.

We looked and saw that Allentown, in fact, had a high prime age employment gap.

Ours was like at 6%.

We dialed into a particular neighborhood and saw that in that area is about 12% the region of about or a neighborhood of about 23,000 people that were just disproportionately out of the labor force or unemployed.

And we started to dig in on that group of people and how could we at the same time prepare as we're thinking about like these changes and the changes to the demands of the workforce, how can we make sure that our people could work, right?

And that was where these two things came together is

We knew that through working with our partners at the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, there's still a high demand for manufacturing labor as well as health care.

We knew that the barriers to getting people to good jobs sometimes were a lack of available resources, things like flexible and affordable child care.

We knew that people were sometimes challenged by transportation, that if those jobs are out in the suburbs and they didn't have a car available,

It was hard to get to them.

And we also knew that if we wanted to make sure that people without cars could get to work, we wanted to build industrial sites in the city.

So we put together an application and submitted it to EDA.

And again, because of the work that we had done in the past, we're successful.

So we landed a strategic development grant in December of 23, and then we got a $20 million investment for implementation.

So our team right now is working to make sure that

As we work to bring these manufacturing jobs to not just the city, but to the entire region, that Alantonians are well positioned to get to those jobs.