Mission Statement

Our mission at AMCC is to create and strengthen an alliance of communities with regional economic development initiatives underway dedicated to achieving sustainability through economic growth, improved environmental performance, and inclusive well-paid job creation supporting initiatives to create new opportunities and equity within a revitalized American manufacturing base.

Purpose

Manufacturing is the leading edge of America’s economic strength in communities around the nation – producing good-paying jobs and economic development at a higher rate than any other sector. Building a better, cleaner, fairer, more secure, inclusive, innovative, and sustainable manufacturing sector is critical to American progress.

In 2018, many Investing in Manufacturing Community Partnership (IMCP) communities and their allies believed that morphing this collaborative from “a government program” into one that has organizational support from aligned organizations with common bottom up regional goals would add value to all. From this, in 2018 the IMCP communities created the American Manufacturing Community Collaborative (AMCC). Most of the existing IMCP communities joined AMCC as volunteers, hoping to enjoy the benefits of more voluntary organizational support in partnership with other non-profit institutions with similar interests, organizations that can both support and derive value from the work that existing AMCC members produce in as open and transparent a manner as possible.

At the same time, since the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act created a new “designated community” program modeling IMCP, the stage was set for a new group of federally designated manufacturing communities to join AMCC. Many of the original IMCP communities were part of the 40 regions across the country that applied for the DoD designation in 2020. Focused on manufacturing communities that support the defense industrial base, the Defense Manufacturing Community Support Program (DMCSP) is adding and receiving important value from the original IMCP communities and new regional cohorts participating in AMCC.

For those communities that do not become newly designated communities in this or any subsequent year, either in the DMCSP or in any manufacturing related federal designation program at the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Defense, Labor or the National Science Foundation, participating in AMCC’s free and open source activities enables manufacturing community stakeholders an efficient place to share best practices with the help of AMCC’s organizational support.

We strongly believe what the best evidence suggests: that federal and other designated manufacturing related regional community interventions should be expanded, studied, funded, and encouraged to strengthen continuously improving regional manufacturing across the country in ways that advance sustainable development for all Americans.