Q&A with Bethany Hartley on 5 years of LIFT Network funding
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From Lippert Components in Elkhart to ITAMCO in Argos to Lock Joint Tube in South Bend, companies, employees and their bottom line have benefitted from different programs offered through the Labs for Industry Futures and Transformation, or LIFT, Network and iNDustry Labs.
Launched with a $42.4 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., the LIFT Network was created as a catalyst for workforce and economic development by enabling employers in the South Bend-Elkhart region to be more competitive, adaptive and resilient in an increasingly fast-paced global marketplace.
The University of Notre Dame, the South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership and other key regional stakeholders have collaborated since 2019 to advance the region’s economic leadership in next-generation manufacturing, entrepreneurship, applied analytics and technology.
After five years of work, Inside INdiana Business spoke with Regional Partnership President Bethany Hartley on what comes next.
This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Reflecting on the past five years, what are some of the most significant achievements that you have seen through the program, and how have they shaped the region’s economic and industrial landscape?
We’ve seen some of the most significant transformations and outcomes from the LIFT initiative. When we think about talent development, the regional internship program has been significant. We have been able to bring people together on both sides of that market, bring together students that are interested in working in the region with companies that are interested in interns. A lot of those companies never had interns before this program because they didn’t really understand the value of internships and how that exposes future employees to their environment and how important that is in the recruiting cycle, especially in this day and age. That is a program that was created through LIFT and will live on beyond LIFT. We are seeing that as a sustainable program that has also led to other opportunities, where we have been able to partner with the chambers in the region. Not only are those interns getting a great employment experience, they’re also getting a great cultural experience. Seeing the landscape shift, they’re able to actually go to the River District in Elkhart, when seven years ago, there wasn’t even a River District.
Not a lot of people know this about the LIFT initiative but it did help fund some innovation facilities. So the Community Learning Center at the library in downtown South Bend, we helped put funding towards that. The Ivy Tech iFlex lab out in Goshen also received funding. So these were locations where there was a need for hands-on, innovative environments that we were able to help support through LIFT. Those will live on for decades to come.
The other piece is we’re really starting to look at ourselves differently, which is an intangible benefit. We are recognizing that with the blending of innovation and research, especially on the higher education side of things, blending that with our industry, our manufacturing base, really powerful outcomes can come from that.
Hartley speaks on the sustainability of the regional internship program.
After the first five years, are there any new initiatives in the works? How will the internship be evolving moving forward?
Some of the programs that were funded through LIFT are being sunsetted because the funding has concluded. We are able to keep going with a few of the programs for a few different reasons. So in the example of the internship program. Yes, it is funded through LIFT but employers are also responsible for some of the cost of the intern, so it’s a matching situation. We also received some READI 1.0 funding to support this. Things like the skills accelerator for short-term credentialing, that has another couple years of funding available currently. That also has a matching component for employers. So none of this was getting 100% of everything covered; that’s not sustainable. We have been looking at the sustainability component very closely for the last couple years.
Things like READI being able to help support internship programs, they helped with a manufacturing accelerator program that iNDustry Labs is running right now and then thinking about future initiatives. While READI is different from LIFT, LIFT taught us a lot. We were able to really get cohesive as a region in deploying these opportunities out across our three counties. When you think about the future, I think about building on what we’ve already been doing the last five years. So yes to work-based learning, yes to entrepreneurship, to internships. We are starting to explore what retaining mid-career professionals looks like across our target industries. What structures or systems could we put in place to help companies out with mid- to senior-level talent? Also Notre Dame, over the last couple years has gotten very bullish on their research and it’s continuing to grow. So as a region, how are we responding to that? How are we thinking about the companies we’re recruiting here? How are we thinking about the companies that are here and connecting them to resources? Those are some of the things that are on the horizon for us as a region.
What strategies were used to train or retrain people that want to move into the advanced industries?
We had a couple different initiatives around that under LIFT. I mentioned the LIFT Skills Accelerator. That was a program that spun out post-COVID because we realized companies actually needed some of those short-term credentials and training for their current team to be upskilled to use the new technologies. We provided a match subsidy to employers in the region, and it’s still open today for trainings that are nationally recognized. That has been very successful. We worked very closely with Work One Northern Indiana on apprenticeship. The workforce board in the region created pathways through the Department of Labor that subsidize specific career pathways that are on that path to high wage, high demand careers. That’s one of the programs we will be sunsetting. Working with Work One, we know that there are other training dollars out there for our region to help offset the funding that has gone away.
We also worked with all nine of our higher eds. So there’s Notre Dame, but then the other eight higher eds. At the beginning of the funding for LIFT, we had the digital skills accelerator fund that those other eight higher eds could apply for to do credit-bearing programming at their college or university. Again, the intent is, how can we retrain, reskill, upskill, to ensure that we have the workforce of the future? Our region needs so many of those things to continue and those universities have been able to find other ways of supporting it beyond the grant. The skills accelerator will go on beyond the grant cycle and the internships would primarily focus on career pathways in healthcare, manufacturing and IT.
One of the objectives of LIFT was to mitigate the risk of job disruptions because of automation and AI. Was the program successful in that regard?
So we did not see jobs being lost to automation. We did see an increase in automation, robots and cobots in the region. At the same time, the folks that are working with those were being trained on how to use them, so in turn, not losing their jobs and actually more often than not making more because it’s a more sophisticated role that requires certain training. Our region has a disproportionate amount of the Manufacturing Readiness Grants coming our way, so we’re encouraged by that. We can correlate some of those successes to the work of iNDustry Labs and the LIFT Initiative.
When it comes to automation, the intent of LIFT and READI is ensuring we have more resilience in our regional economy. We’ve made progress but we aren’t there yet. As a region, we are not fully automated; we’re not fully industry 4.0 but we are getting there. More and more frequently, manufacturers have both their welding automation on the floor with their manual welders. We’ve also seen a lot of process improvement, which helps with productivity and throughput. That has come from working on innovation projects with teams across the region. So we’ve seen a lot of forward progress and momentum. We’ve learned a lot in the process and I would say we still have a long way to go.
How do you see the LIFT Network influencing the region’s economic competitiveness?
We actually have heard from companies that have looked to our region as a potential location whether it’s a headquarters or expansion and also from companies within the region that what we have is quite unique as a region. We are being looked to as the epicenter that we are. Geographically, there’s no denying that it is a prime location, with our interstate access, we have an international airport, we have a Foreign Trade Zone. We’re 90 minutes from Chicago, two and a half hours from Detroit. These are things that have always been true but then you add the fact that there is a community in a region that is unifying around making the businesses here the best, most profitable businesses they could possibly be.
We’re able to say to companies, we want you to be successful right here. We want your people to be successful right here. We want you to invest in this region, both personally and professionally. All we ask is, be a part of the community. And I think that is unique to our region. If our companies are great, this place will be great and then we can invest in our own area. And that is different. We’re not waiting for someone to come and save us. We’re saving ourselves.
There’s a very huge emphasis on collaboration in the partnership’s Ensuring Prosperity Plan. How has the culture of collaboration between academic leaders, industry, government stakeholders, grown during the LIFT Initiative?
So it’s interesting timing, because as a region, we’re about to host the University Economic Development Association Conference in two weeks, October 7-9. Pam Whitten, the president of IU, will be up here for it. Indiana Secretary of Commerce David Rosenberg will be up here. That is a perfect example. As the Regional Partnership, we bring together our higher eds every quarter for discussion, for best practice sharing and for collaboration. We also bring together industry partners in a similar fashion.
You think about Ivy Tech South Bend-Elkhart, they’ve done a great partnership with Beacon Health System to provide health care workers that are much needed and in demand. They have also worked with Lippert Components on some training activities that they need for their employees. You have Holy Cross who is working with Notre Dame on the downtown tech and talent hub. You look at IU South Bend, working in the health care space. Never before have I seen where the leadership of our nine higher eds have come together and are responding to needs and the future needs of our workforce and our companies here. There’s a willingness to step outside of the box. They’re saying, “How can we be more nimble to the needs of the industry?” And I don’t know if that would have happened if not for something like LIFT as a catalyst five years ago.
Does the regional partnership have initiatives to engage with students in high school?
Yes and no. Engaging at the K-12 level is not part of the regional partnership’s current mission and strategies. Part of the reason for that is, simply put, it’s so complicated. It’s very much a local process when it comes to K-12 education. At the same time, through things like LIFT, we helped fund some entrepreneurial education at the K-12 level. So we worked with RISE to provide funding for Startup Moxie for high school students. I sit on the board for Startup Moxie Elkhart County and for RISE. That’s the extent of our involvement but there are a lot of really good organizations across the region that focus on programming for K-12 and workforce. The lift required to do some of that coordination is quite significant. So we’ve had to think about what we are biting off and if we are biting off more than we can chew going down that path.
How do you anticipate the region positioning itself as a next generational leader in manufacturing and applied technologies over the next decade?
I think we are turning the page on having outsized potential that we have yet to tap into. We are seizing our potential as a region. With the state of Indiana as a whole, it’s great to be humble. That is a wonderful attribute but at the same time, we have to believe that we are who we are and that we are capable. That mentality is starting to shift here. People actually believe we are a globally competitive region. We have these intersections that are pretty incredible and beyond one or two entities. The amount of knowledge and experience here is quite unique. Among the private research institutions in the Association of American Universities, Notre Dame is located in the third-smallest economic market. That is unique and distinct; it allows us to think about the speed of business so much faster.
Accessibility is our strength. Our speed to market is our strength, and our willingness to say yes to things is our strength. We need more folks to recognize that is what we are. We are capable of so much more than what we actually think. I look at our investments from the federal level, from the Department of Defense, the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs, the research dollars, the innovation dollars, those continue to go up in this region. It’s not going backwards. We are getting more sophisticated companies here, more sophisticated people, and that is what creates that kind of flywheel of an ecosystem between the work we do as an organization and all the partners that have been laying the groundwork on this for the last 15 years, through the times when we were at 20% unemployment and told we were falling apart.
People are doing the work here, and I think that’s pretty special. What’s ahead of us? We don’t even know yet. I heard someone talking about manufacturing in space the other day. There’s this optimism that is being acted on and that’s the big difference. People have been optimistic and now they’re taking action whether that’s through investments, expanding their own businesses or showing up to things they weren’t otherwise showing up to. We need to keep doing more of that and we’ll see the fruit of all of that.