The Urban Manufacturing Alliance with our local hosts, Made in Baltimore and the Center for Strategic Entrepreneurship at Coppin State, invite you to our 2023 Gathering in Baltimore.

At UMA, we believe that communities need to hold the power to support their own economic mobility. 

What do communities, businesses, residents, leaders, and other stakeholders need to understand in order to achieve true, deep impact?

Where does the power for action live, how can it be accessed, and what must change to reach this new impact?

UMA’s work to champion manufacturing as a strategy for economic mobility is critical at a time as our country confronts challenges that overlap with opportunity: long-simmering manufacturing job shortages, historic economic inequality across place, demands for higher job quality and benefits, the passage of historical federal legislation to support the sector, and ongoing racial justice reckonings within and around businesses and communities.

Our 2023 Gathering Host Community, Baltimore City, is a perfect backdrop for a conversation about these intersecting dynamics. 

Please join us to explore the various levers that cities and communities have utilized for inclusive economic development through manufacturing, and how those strategies can be replicated across place. 

UMA’s Gathering, Manufacturing Power: Levers for inclusive action through production economies, will lift up the work of both practitioners and businesses based in Baltimore, the region, and others in our national network of manufacturing practitioners. The Gathering will showcase leaders, policies, and initiatives that are moving power into communities to promote small- and large-scale manufacturing as strategies for economic mobility – and use Baltimore’s many diverse neighborhoods as a backdrop for conversation.