Monday, 24 December 2012

The Next (Regenerative) Industrial Age.....

Submitted by Susan Arterian on Tue, 11/20/2012 - 14:18 Ref Capital Institute Blog

The Next (Regenerative) Industrial Age: The Story of the Manufacturing Renaissance Campaign

Our First Digitally Enhanced Field Guide Story Just Released!

The Next (Regenerative) Industrial Age: The Story of the Manufacturing Renaissance Campaign, is the Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy initiative's first eBook. With the eBook format we hope to engage you in a more immersive way in the regenerative economy storytelling experience. Our free eBook is available in its most digitally enhanced format as an iBook for the iPad. The iBook includes photo galleries, videos, and extensive hyperlinking to external resources. We also encourage you to access the direct email links in the eBook to share with us your own regenerative economy stories and reflections. For those who don't have access to an eReader we have also published the eBook on the Vook web-based platform. Free Nook and Kindle versions will be released soon.

About the Manufacturing Renaissance Campaign

After bearing witness over the past three decades to a relentless stream of plant closings, jobs off shored, and communities devastated by industrial accidents, it is little wonder that Americans are likely to describe what they once considered their vibrant domestic manufacturing economy in three words: dirty, dangerous, and dead-ended. Over those same decades the Center for Labor and Community Research and its visionary founder Dan Swinney have been studying the root causes of manufacturing’s fall from grace. What they began to chronicle, beyond the obvious globalization pressures, was the untold story of otherwise healthy, small- to medium-sized private companies that had failed to effectively plan for either management or ownership succession, and as a result had no alternative but to sell out to Wall Street LBO engineers and industrial consolidators who had no commitment to the long-term stewardship of their businesses. Equally troubling was what they uncovered of the public sector’s (and in particular, public education’s) failure to respond to the changing nature and requirements of American manufacturing.
At the same time CLCR has been attempting to frame a discussion around the regenerative role manufacturing can and must play in a new industrial age. CLCR’s initiative, the Manufacturing Renaissance Campaign (MRC) and its Polytechnic Career Program, now incubating at Austin Polytechnical Academy in inner city Chicago, is now scaling up into a national effort. The MRC is forging partnerships among leaders of government, organized labor, public education, the private sector and civil society who have put their differences aside to rally around a shared belief: that manufacturing, in its current advanced evolution, can and must be mobilized to restore the damaged societal and biophysical systems that represent the dark side of its legacy.