With federal support for robotics and defense, this Pennsylvania town is reinventing itself

If you’re a company looking for defense manufacturing, Southwestern PA is the place to be. For the 34th year in a row, major corporations from around the world joined government officials and local organizations in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to attract defense contracts to the region. 

Called the Showcase for Commerce, the annual event has long served as a hub for collaboration, where attendees from around the world come to exchange ideas, forge partnerships and ink defense contracts that fuel the regional economy. 

But Johnstown faces a growing challenge — who will do the work to fulfill these defense contracts?

“We’re losing young people,” said David Grimaldi, director of workforce development at JARI, a nonprofit economic development organization in Johnstown. “We just want to keep the people and provide a workforce for our manufacturers who are in desperate need of it because of the contracts they have.” 

The Johnstown metro area ranked as the third fastest-shrinking city in the country in 2017, and in the years since, it has struggled to reverse that trend. The most recent figures put the population of Johnstown proper at 17,668, a nearly 4% decline since the 2020 Census, or a drop of nearly 1% per year, according to data from the World Population Review.

With local defense manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and Martin-Baker America landing big contracts in recent years, demand for entry level workers trained in basic manufacturing skills is growing, according to Grimaldi, and federal dollars are already flowing into Johnstown to address this problem. 

The New Economy Collaborative (NEC) of Southwestern Pennsylvania, an organization tasked with administering $62.7 million of the federal Build Back Better (BBB) Regional Challenge, is providing grants to organizations in the region to expand pathways to entrepreneurship and new manufacturing jobs.

That $62.7 million is part of a broader $1 billion BBB initiative, launched in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan to spur post-pandemic economic recovery and revitalize communities impacted by decades of industrial decline.

Southwestern Pennsylvania was fortunate to receive federal funding to supercharge robotics and automation, according to Jackie Erickson, the senior director of federal government affairs for the Allegheny County Conference on Community Development, which is part of the NEC.

“For many years, most of the funding for robotics went into Carnegie Mellon University, and a lot of that was geared towards the defense sector,”  Erickson said. 

But in recent years, partially thanks to NEC funding, robotics adoption is spreading beyond the city of Pittsburgh, out into more rural areas of Southwestern Pennsylvania. 

The NEC is deploying funds through five projects across 11 counties in the region, including Cambria County, where Johnstown is located. The projects focus on adopting robotics in manufacturing, upskilling the regional workforce and commercializing new technologies for the advanced manufacturing sector.

Helping people find work, helping companies find skilled labor

JARI recently received a $144,000 grant from the New Economy Collaborative to support workforce development programs aimed at underemployed and unemployed residents in the region.

“We go directly into the Johnstown Housing Authority units and provide work readiness skills to those people that are underemployed or unemployed, giving them the skills that they need to get into the workforce,” said Grimaldi, the organization’s workforce director. 

The initiative is already showing results.

In the first cohort of JARI’s Work Readiness Program, a mother and daughter participated together, Grimaldi said. After her father’s recent death, the daughter had been working part time at a local Dollar General, while her mother was unemployed. Completing the program helped the daughter get into Drexel University, while her mother enrolled at the Greater Johnstown Career and Technology Center to train as an automotive technician.

Without NEC and BBB funding, JARI wouldn’t be able to offer as many economic development opportunities in the area, Grimaldi said. 

Down the street, a local makerspace called Made in Johnstown is using the same federal funding to change residents’ lives through workforce training bootcamps, certification classes and entrepreneurial mentorship.

Director Michael Rottam received federal funding routed through the NEC to help him launch the makerspace and provide programming. Since opening Made in Johnstown’s doors, he’s seen the space make a tangible impact on the community.

“One gentleman who went through our bootcamp, he was working at the local Walmart and had three children and wanted to better his life,” Rottman said. 

After attending the makerspace’s workforce training bootcamp, the father enrolled in a local vocational school to become a robotics technician and now works for a local manufacturer.

‘Robotics and defense go hand in hand’

JARI and Made in Johnstown were featured at last week’s event, where government officials from both sides of the aisle, including US Sen. John Fetterman and US Rep. Glenn Thompson, were able to see their work firsthand.

The showcase has a rich history, according to Allegheny Conference’s Erickson, who helped coordinate the showcase for a number of years while working for Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s former senator. 

Over 30 years ago, former US Rep. John Murtha established the showcase to promote job creation and advanced manufacturing in the region, Erickson said. Since his death in 2010, the event has continued with strong bipartisan support.

The showcase has helped introduce large and small manufacturers from around the world to the region, helping develop a strong defense supply chain in Cambria and surrounding counties.

And Southwestern Pennsylvania is well positioned to advance the defense sector moving forward, Erickson said. 
“Robotics and defense go hand in hand,” Erickson said. “As we look towards what the Defense Department is doing with different and new capabilities for future national security reasons, robotics is going to be at the heart of that.”