Manufacturing jobs campaign targets KC

By MARK KIND
Kansas City Business Journal

With $900,000 from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and $500,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor, the Manufacturing Institute visited Kansas City on Tuesday to help launch a campaign aimed at luring young people into manufacturing careers.

"We are coming to a crisis in American manufacturing," Kauffman CEO Carl Schramm said at the organization's offices.

Unless trends reverse, U.S. manufacturers will have a shortage of 5 million workers by 2010 and 15 million workers by 2020, said Jerry Jasinowski, president of the Manufacturing Institute.

Dream It Do It is a pilot campaign targeting Kansas City. Houston probably will have a similar pilot by the end of 2005, Jasinowski said.

Kansas City's campaign grew out of an alliance between the Kansas City Area Development Council and the National Association of Manufacturers, the institute's parent organization. The KCADC has focused on manufacturing for the past two years, bringing attention to the business concerns of the 4,000 manufacturers in the area.

The Dream It Do It campaign is run by the Alliance for Innovation in Manufacturing -- Kansas City, which the KCADC and the manufacturing organizations founded in 2004.

The $1.6 million campaign is evident on billboards and buses, where advertisements featuring portraits of young models urge readers to Dream It Do It.

The campaign also will place ads in local publications and theaters and on radio stations and Web sites, and it will sponsor job fairs and educational events. More information about the campaign is available on its Web site.