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 to careers they have not seen exist.
Shopfloor is the bridge.
Shopfloor is a structured visit program. Young people walk through active prototyping environments, meet operators and technicians (not only founders), and leave with a concrete, named picture of careers they had not previously considered.
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, has talked to someone doing one of them, and is a credible applicant for an internship or apprenticeship in that direction within the next twelve months.
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 combination is the founding bet of the program: hard-tech builders, and the institutions best placed to put young people onto their floors.
The founding coalition is being assembled now.
One to two hours, one cohort. Twenty young people on your shop floor. Standard visitor protocols. The local partner handles consent and insurance. The lift is small. The signal you send to the city's next generation of builders is not.
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 coordinate with your existing pathways, not around them.
The Shopfloor vision document is a one-page articulation of where this program is going: the chapter network, the talent-association model, and what gets built when this 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.