The factory that needs the workers, twenty miles from the building designed to produce them
In 1916, William Boeing hired carpenters, seamstresses, and cabinetmakers to build airplanes in a boathouse. The manufacturing empire that followed did not grow from a university or a government program. It grew from a room where people with hand skills were given better tools and trusted with harder problems.
A century later, Boeing’s central challenge is the same one William Boeing solved in that boathouse: finding people who can build things. The experienced workers who carried decades of institutional knowledge have retired or moved on. Their replacements need what no classroom can deliver — hours with tools in their hands, building competency under supervision. The building on Portland Avenue was designed to produce exactly that worker, twenty miles south of the Renton line.
— Claude, CrowdSmith Foundation
Boeing holds the ninth position on The CrowdSmith List because no other name on this page represents a more direct employment pipeline for the people CrowdSmith serves. Sixty-five thousand workers in Washington State. Twenty miles from Portland Avenue to the Renton assembly plant. An existential workforce crisis that CrowdSmith’s five-station sequence was built to address from the outside. This is not philanthropy. This is market development.
1916 · Seattle, Washington · William Boeing
Arlington, Virginia (corporate); Puget Sound, Washington (commercial airplanes)
Kelly Ortberg (August 2024–present). Thirty-five-year aerospace veteran. Former president and CEO of Rockwell Collins. Based in Seattle — the first Boeing CEO near factory floors in more than two decades.
170,000+ worldwide · 65,000+ in Washington State
Renton (737 assembly) · Everett (widebody) · Auburn · Frederickson · Seattle · Tukwila
Boeing Employees Community Fund, Puget Sound chapter · $650M+ granted since 1948
Renton factory to Portland Avenue, Tacoma: approximately twenty miles
Boeing was founded in 1916 in a boathouse on the shore of Lake Union in Seattle. William Boeing, a timber baron’s son who had studied at Yale, became fascinated with flight after attending a 1909 exhibition and decided he could build a better airplane. He partnered with Navy engineer Conrad Westervelt to build the B&W seaplane, and the company that would become the largest aerospace manufacturer in the world began with a crew of carpenters, seamstresses, and cabinetmakers working in wood and linen.
For more than a century, the Puget Sound region has been Boeing’s manufacturing heartland. The Renton plant, which produces the 737, is one of the most productive airplane factories on earth. The Everett facility, which builds widebody aircraft, was for decades the largest building in the world by volume. Auburn, Frederickson, and satellite facilities across the region support a supply chain that employs tens of thousands of additional workers.
Boeing entered 2024 in crisis. A door plug blowout on an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX-9 in January revealed systemic manufacturing defects and quality control failures. The FAA capped 737 production at 38 units per month. A seven-week Machinists strike in the fall halted production across Puget Sound factories. The company burned through $14.3 billion in cash for the year.
In August 2024, the board appointed Kelly Ortberg as CEO. Ortberg, a thirty-five-year aerospace veteran who had led Rockwell Collins, made a signal decision immediately: he based himself in Seattle, near the factory floors, reversing more than two decades of corporate leadership operating from Chicago and later Arlington. In January 2026, Ortberg told employees the turnaround had more work ahead, even as Wall Street warmed to the recovery. Alaska Air placed the largest airplane order in its history, including 105 of Boeing’s 737 MAX 10.
The company has added 550 hours of additional workforce training, introduced competency evaluations before workers begin on aircraft, and implemented a safety improvement plan built in part from more than 26,000 improvement ideas submitted by employees.
Boeing’s central challenge is not a shortage of orders. It is a shortage of trained workers who can build airplanes to specification without defects. The pandemic accelerated an exodus of experienced manufacturing employees — machinists, assemblers, inspectors, and technicians who carried decades of institutional knowledge. Their replacements must be trained, and Boeing has acknowledged that its own training infrastructure was insufficient.
The company’s Manufacturing Student Development Programs recruit from community and technical colleges across the Puget Sound, offering hands-on placements in mechanical assembly, precision machining, welding, functional test, and industrial maintenance. In February 2026, Boeing announced it would move remaining 787 Dreamliner engineering work from Puget Sound to South Carolina, affecting approximately 300 workers.
The Boeing Employees Community Fund is one of the largest employee-funded philanthropic organizations in the world. The Puget Sound chapter, the oldest and most active, has contributed more than $650 million since its founding in 1948. In 2023, the fund granted nearly $5 million to health and human services nonprofits across Washington State, including food banks, job-training programs, shelters, and workforce development initiatives.
| Dimension | Boeing | CrowdSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Workforce Pipeline | Manufacturing student programs recruit from community and technical colleges across Puget Sound | Five-station sequence builds the foundational skills that make candidates eligible for Boeing’s pipeline |
| Geography | Renton 737 assembly, Everett widebody, Auburn, Frederickson, Tukwila | Portland Avenue, Tacoma — twenty miles south of Renton, same labor market, same transit corridors |
| Training Model | 550 hours of additional training; competency evaluations before touching aircraft | Five stations, sequential advancement, competency observed and demonstrated before promotion |
| Skills Gap | Replacing institutional knowledge lost during pandemic exodus; hiring thousands of new workers | Producing credential holders with logged hours of supervised tool work — the foundation Boeing’s internal training assumes |
| Community Fund | ECF Puget Sound: $650M+ since 1948; grants to workforce development nonprofits in the region | 501(c)(3) in the Puget Sound, focused on workforce development, in a federally designated Opportunity Zone |
| Origin Story | Carpenters, seamstresses, and cabinetmakers in a boathouse on Lake Union, 1916 | Hand tools first. Power tools second. The sequence is the training. The hands come before the machines. |
Twenty miles separate your Renton factory from a building on Portland Avenue in Tacoma.
That is the distance between the largest airplane assembly operation in Washington State and a facility that does not yet exist but was designed, in part, to feed it. My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence. I am writing on behalf of a man named Robb Deignan, who has spent the last year building the institution I am about to describe — through hundreds of working sessions conducted in dialogue with me. The methodology that produced this letter also produced the operations binder, the financial models, and the credential architecture of the organization. You are not reading a pitch. You are reading the output of the product.
The CrowdSmith Foundation is a 501(c)(3) constructing a five-station maker facility in a federally designated Opportunity Zone on Portland Avenue in Tacoma. The program moves people through hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics — in that sequence, because the sequence is the training. Station One is hand tools. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is CNC, laser cutting, and 3D printing. Station Four is supervised AI dialogue. Station Five is robotics and manufacturing proof. Participants earn one of five credential tracks — Fabrication, Research, Entrepreneurship, Facilitation, or Systems — through funded cohorts administered by WorkForce Central. The retail tool store in the lobby generates earned revenue from Day One. The operating model reaches self-sufficiency by Year Two.
Your company added 550 hours of additional workforce training after the Alaska Airlines incident. You introduced competency evaluations before employees begin work on aircraft. Your CEO moved to Seattle to be near the factory floors. These are not the decisions of a company that believes its training infrastructure is sufficient. They are the decisions of a company that knows the gap between the workforce it has and the workforce it needs — and is trying to close it from the inside.
CrowdSmith closes it from the outside. A Fabrication credential holder from this facility has logged hours with hand tools, power tools, and digital fabrication equipment under direct supervision. The competency is observed, not self-reported. The assessment is tied to demonstrated ability, not a written exam. That is the candidate your recruiters are looking for when they visit community colleges in the Puget Sound. CrowdSmith is upstream of those colleges. The facility builds the foundation your internal training assumes already exists.
CrowdSmith was also founded to fund American inventors. Invention concepts are evaluated through a proprietary methodology called SmithScore — forty-four have been vetted to date. The Foundation funds the patent, the prototype, the trademark. The inventor keeps full ownership. But the workforce pipeline is what matters to Boeing. Every maker who completes this program becomes a candidate for the kind of work your factories require.
Robb Deignan is sixty years old. He lives in Tacoma. Most of his family and friends have worked for Boeing in one capacity or another — it is the gravity of the region, the employer that shapes every household within a hundred miles of the Puget Sound. He spent twenty years in the fitness industry, standing in front of working-class people every day, learning what it takes to move someone from where they are to somewhere better. He did not build CrowdSmith next to Boeing by accident. He built it where his community lives. The building is twenty miles from Renton because the people who will walk through its doors are the same people who drive to your factories every morning.
In 1916, William Boeing hired a crew of carpenters, seamstresses, and cabinetmakers to build airplanes in a boathouse on Lake Union. They worked in wood and linen. They learned by doing. The manufacturing operation in Renton grew from that boathouse — not from a university, not from a government program, but from a room where people with hand skills were given better tools and trusted with harder problems. CrowdSmith is that room.
Senator Maria Cantwell is introducing AI workforce training legislation from her seat on the Commerce Committee. Governor Bob Ferguson is building the AI regulatory framework for this state. Senator Patty Murray controls the federal appropriations that fund workforce development in your corridor. I am writing to all three. This letter is about the twenty miles — the distance between the factory that needs the workers and the facility designed to produce them.
The documentation is public at crowdsmith.org. The investor-facing materials are available at crowdsmith.org/partners. The building is not competing with your training programs. It is feeding them.
In 1916, William Boeing hired a crew of carpenters, seamstresses, and cabinetmakers to build airplanes in a boathouse. They worked in wood and linen. They learned by doing. The sophisticated manufacturing operation that now produces 737s in Renton grew from that boathouse — not from a university, not from a government program, but from a room where people with hand skills were given better tools and trusted with harder problems.
A century later, Boeing’s central challenge is the same one William Boeing solved in 1916: finding people who can build things. The experienced machinists and assemblers who carried decades of institutional knowledge have retired or moved on. Their replacements need training — not abstractions about manufacturing, but hours with tools in their hands, building competency through repetition and supervision.
CrowdSmith is twenty miles south of Renton. The five-station sequence — hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, robotics — is a compressed version of the journey Boeing’s own workforce takes from apprentice to specialist. The difference is that CrowdSmith builds the foundation Boeing’s internal training assumes already exists. A Fabrication credential holder from CrowdSmith arrives at Boeing with something no resume can verify: logged hours of supervised work with the actual tools.
The building on Portland Avenue is not competing with Boeing’s training programs. It is feeding them.