Join us in Building a Sustainable, Resilient, and Inclusive Regions-Up Economy

This week, Governor Newsom released the California Jobs First Economic Blueprint, a statewide plan to drive sustainable economic growth, innovation, and access to good-paying jobs over the next decade. This plan was the culmination of two years of work with 13 economic regions across the state as part of the California Jobs First program, an effort that began as the “Community Economic Resilience Fund” and was renamed “California Jobs First” at the California Economic Summit in 2023.

CA FWD has been deeply involved in “regions-up” inclusive economic development with the Newsom Administration since the launch of “Regions Rise Together” in 2019. A key role we play is as critical interconnective tissue between the state agencies and the regional work done by our California Stewardship Network partners and other regional organizations and stakeholders leading California Jobs First collaboratives.

The just-released Economic Blueprint identifies priority sectors in three categories: strengthen (where the state has competitive advantage but “there is leveling growth or wages”), accelerate (sectors where there is moderate to high projected growth but need for additional investment), and bet (“emerging sectors with significant investment or high strategic importance to the innovation ecosystem”).

The Blueprint also identifies four specific “pilot” sectors and subsectors from the “accelerate” list as areas of state focus for the next several years, with the goal “to develop a new, replicable model for accelerating industry attraction and expansion and increasing access to good-paying jobs.” These four sectors are: space, defense and satellites; agricultural technology and farm equipment; life sciences; and semiconductors and microelectronics.

Overall, the Blueprint reflects important aspects of the work happening in regions to develop stronger and more resilient economies throughout California. Importantly, it provides a clear set of priorities around the industries and sectors most likely to garner state support, especially in the final two years of Governor Newsom’s administration. It also includes critical connections to the state’s workforce assets, in particular its strong network of apprenticeship programs and the recently released Master Plan for Career Education. In this way, it is reminiscent of other industrial policy efforts put forward by state economic development agencies around the country, as well as the Supply Chain Executive Order that helped to guide much of the federal spending on critical strategic industries under the Biden-Harris administration.?

CA FWD applauds the Newsom administration for its clarity of vision for key sectors for state investment, and we are poised to support this work by connecting regional projects to private investment and other implementation support.

We’re also eager to support our regional partners on strategies not captured in the Blueprint. The original intent of the CERF or California Jobs First work was to invest in economic activities that will simultaneously build stronger regional economies and move the state forward toward its decarbonization and climate resilience goals. Our work with regions across the state, both rural and urban, has lifted up several priorities central to that climate-smart regional economic agenda, but not fully captured or prioritized in the Blueprint. These include two areas where California has an inherent competitive advantage given our abundant natural resources: building out a comprehensive battery supply chain that connects the dots for critical mineral mining to manufacturing to EV production to battery recycling, and moving away from petroleum-based products by leveraging forest and agricultural waste streams to build a strong bioeconomy, including bioindustrial manufacturing. These types of approaches are particularly important to the state’s more rural areas, which lack strong economic diversity but are rich in natural and working lands and biomass.??

CA FWD looks forward to supporting the state in ensuring the Blueprint results in real benefits to people and businesses in every region, while also leaning in on some of the key areas not highlighted or prioritized in the state plan.?

Looking ahead, we’re also very aware of the need for a durable system of state economic development that will last beyond the California Jobs First funding and the current Governor’s administration. That's why we’ve put together a work group made up of regional leaders to design, develop, and implement a more enduring regions-up governance system for California so that the incredible work that’s been seeded through California Jobs First and other regional planning efforts can continue to evolve, grow, and live beyond the changing priorities of any state or federal administration.

In the short term, CA FWD will offer regions concrete and practical opportunities to connect to investors and to a library of approaches to secure tangible community and worker benefits at the project level. At the same time, we’ll continue to push for stronger state structures to allow for every region to build more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive economies, today and well into the future. We hope you’ll join us.