Lessons from Dayton, OH: “Making” Manufacturing Pathways for Community Wealth
Written by Betsey Suchanic
Makerspaces are not a new concept. In economic and community development, we have seen these spaces, both small and large, serve as gateways to entrepreneurship and small-scale manufacturing in their communities. In Dayton, OH, we had a chance to learn from an ambitious new project scaling a local makerspace, with a broader vision of cooperative business ownership and addressing the racial wealth gap.
In June, myself, my colleague Jessica L. González Martínez, and the team from ISM, Inc, went to Dayton for a site visit with the local team and to learn alongside their efforts as part of our Small and Midsized City (SMC) Economic Inclusion Incubator.
In Dayton, OH, we worked with Co-op Dayton to explore how to significantly expand their Westside Makerspace into a hub for small-scale manufacturing, underscored by the goal to create good-paying jobs and a just local economy. This ambitious project, rooted in the community, was spearheaded by local community members and maker space leaders eager to fill a gap for production space in the city and built upon the momentum from Co-op Dayton’s Gem City Market project. Over 12 months, the team at Co-op Dayton worked to secure a site and map out key revenue streams for the envisioned maker space and manufacturing hub. With support from NGIN, International Strategic Management (ISM, Inc.) provided support to explore the financial model and review community input, and Jamaica White, a local Daytonian, supported the site search and selection.
During our June site visit, our core focus was an evening workshop to hear from the community on their vision for the makerspace, see the current makerspace location, as well as tour some of the potential sites. While our focus was the makerspace and manufacturing hub project, the team at Co-op Dayton also ensured that we understood the project in the context of Dayton’s economic landscape. We spent the day with team members from Co-op Dayton, Cherrelle Gardner , a Co-Executive Director, and Lela Klein , a former Co-Executive Director. They shared about significant efforts, such as Gem City Market, the Wright-Dunbar neighborhood (complete with their Walk of Fame!), and the Arcade Innovation Hub.
While we gained a lot of local knowledge during this trip, we also learned some key lessons that can help drive inclusive growth in all communities working towards similar goals.
Key Lessons from Dayton
Equitable economic development requires an entrepreneurial approach.
As someone with a background in entrepreneurship, it is not lost on me how entrepreneurial practitioners, like Cherrelle, have to be to get projects like this makerspace and manufacturing hub off the ground and sustain them in the long term. Projects like this one put those who are often helping and coaching entrepreneurs directly in their shoes as they look outside of the box at earned income revenue streams and social enterprise business models that will allow long-term sustainability. Finding pathways to not rely on one-off grant funds or sponsorships to sustain this critical, long-term work can be challenging but is often necessary.
Cooperation is not just a business structure.
While this seems obvious, in economic development, we often talk about cooperative businesses as legal entities or business structures, but that’s only part of the story. As evidenced in our visit to Dayton and Co-op Dayton’s approach to community engagement, cooperation was baked into the culture of every relationship and project, with transparency, collective decision-making, and moving at the speed of trust. It was this culture, contrasted with how economic development has traditionally operated in cities, that illustrated a need to strive towards cooperative culture in our norms as a field.
History doesn’t need to define your city; you can create a new story.
As with many Small and Midsized Cities in the Rust Belt, Dayton has a powerful historical story of economic investment and disinvestment that has only exacerbated existing economic inequities. However, when speaking with Daytonians, they consider the manufacturing and innovation history of the city an asset, pointing to having at one point the most patents per capita, the Wright Brothers, and a host of inventions from Dayton (including the Cheez-It!). The parallels of this rich manufacturing history deeply align with this makerspace and manufacturing hub project. In many ways, the team at Co-op Dayton is working to rewrite this next chapter of Dayton’s economic story by celebrating the history of manufacturing, but also led by community and with equity at the center.
You may need to rethink what the assets in your community are.
As we drove or walked through Dayton, every few minutes, Cherrelle would point out another large building and say, “We considered this building for the site…”. This emphasized the number of vacant buildings and warehouse spaces in Dayton, a product of the history of industry leaving and resulting disinvestment. However, in many ways, that presents an opportunity for Dayton and projects like this makerspace, to activate those vacancies. In contrast, when visiting some of our other Economic Inclusion Incubator cities, with affordability being a significant challenge, a project like this hub would take far more capital and have much more limited options for location. Dayton’s vacancies are an asset to the community for the potential they provide and the creativity and innovation that organizations like Co-op Dayton are catalyzing to turn them into economic opportunities.
And don’t just take our word about the work this group of leaders are spearheading in Dayton, the below video provides a snapshot of Dayton, their local team and partners, and more about their project with NGIN.
The Economic Inclusion Incubator program launched in June 2023 as part of NGIN’s Small and Midsized City Hub. As this 12-month program ends, we are happy to share a selection of reflection pieces about the incredible work the four selected communities completed as part of this program. This piece is part three of a four-part series. The previous two posts highlighting the work done in Tacoma, WA, Savannah, GA, and Utica, NY can be found on our blog.
NGIN’s Small and Midsized City Hub is a national community of practice for economic and community development practitioners across more than 700 cities in the United States. NGIN offers support to connect, engage, and share solutions and resources to bolster inclusive economic growth in these communities. We have been working directly with four cities piloting economic inclusion solutions in their city as part of our Economic Inclusion Incubator program. These four cities – Dayton, OH, Savannah, GA, Tacoma, WA, and Utica, NY – were selected following a national call for projects from small and midsized cities and kicked off their projects in June 2023.