Shopfloor walks young people through the floors of the companies building the American industrial future, and puts them in front of the people doing the work.
South Bay SWIB.
Each city has its own builders, its own schools and its own operating partner. The program is the same in all of them.
The highest concentration of startups on earth, a few miles from the city's public high schools.
Aerospace and defense manufacturing, and the hardware companies that have grown up around it.
Chip fabs and vehicle plants within driving distance of the city's schools.
A century of manufacturing depth, with new plants going up around it.
Hard-tech companies are building the American industrial future a few miles from the high schools and workforce programs of the cities they sit in. Most young people who live there have never been inside one. They cannot apply for careers they have never seen.
Shopfloor takes them inside.
Shopfloor is a structured visit program. Young people walk through working prototype shops, meet operators and technicians as well as founders, and leave able to name careers they had not considered before.
Young people ages 16 through 24, referred through local workforce partners and public high schools. Fifteen to twenty-five young people per visit.
One to two hours of floor time at a host company. A founder or senior operator hosts the first portion. A front-line operator or technician hosts the second: a test engineer, a machinist, a site manager. The point is the work, not the founder.
A young person who can name three jobs that exist in the city's industrial economy and has talked to someone doing one of them. Within twelve months, they are a credible applicant for an internship or apprenticeship in that field.
Shopfloor runs with a local partner in every city, the organization that knows the young people and brings them. In San Francisco that partner is New Door Ventures, which prepares Bay Area young people for work and life. The program's founding bet is pairing hard-tech builders with the institutions best placed to put young people onto their floors.
We are building it now.
One cohort of twenty young people spends one to two hours on your shop floor under your standard visitor protocols. The local partner handles consent and insurance. It asks little of your team and sends a strong signal to the city's next generation of builders.
Principals, CTE coordinators, counselors and workforce program directors. If you serve high schoolers or young adults in one of these cities, Shopfloor will run cohorts you can refer young people into. We work within your existing pathways.
The Shopfloor vision is a one-page document on where the program is going: the chapter network, the talent-association model, and what we build once it works at scale.
A one-page document covering the chapter network, the talent-association model, and the full strategic frame. For funders, advisors, and anyone evaluating the bigger frame.
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