Partners in Progress: Manufacturing & Workforce Updates

Be part of a crucial conversation involving economic, industry, and community resources dedicated to helping manufacturers not just survive, but thrive.

KANKAKEE COUNTY CEO is geared to strengthen our workforce, enhance the partnerships with our employers and high schools, and help our community grow and prosper. The CEO program is spearheaded by the Midland Institute for Entrepreneurship and is in more than 280 schools across the US. It has proven to help students enter the business world and with entrepreneurship. We are excited to launch this in Kankakee County to start the 2023 school year. Three local high schools are already committed including Bishop McNamara, Momence High School and Grant Park High School.

Change is the universe’s default. Progress, at its best, is positive change. As we together weather the unprecedented global reverberations presented by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, subsequent shelter-in-place precautions, and tremendous personal and business losses, it is tempting to abandon the notion of progress. But that would be a tragic mistake.

The Economic Alliance of Kankakee County proudly supports Selling Happiness and The Lively One, twin PBS-slated documentaries by acclaimed filmmakers Tom Desch and Pat Wisniewski with Lakeshore Public Media that recount the thrilling story of how Kankakee’s Romy Hammes and his descendants developed new promotional, service and financing models that brought the automobile to the masses in its earliest days of production.