| Founded | 1916 • Seattle, Washington • William Boeing |
| Headquarters | Arlington, Virginia (corporate); Puget Sound, WA (commercial airplanes) |
| CEO | Kelly Ortberg (August 2024–present) • Based in Seattle • First CEO near factory floors in decades |
| Employees | 170,000+ worldwide • 65,000+ in Washington State |
| WA Facilities | Renton (737 assembly) • Everett (widebody) • Auburn, Frederickson, Seattle, Tukwila |
| Community Fund | Employees Community Fund Puget Sound • $650M+ granted since 1948 |
| Distance | Renton factory to Portland Avenue, Tacoma: approximately 20 miles |
A Century in Puget Sound
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.
The Turnaround
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 35-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. Before the Senate Commerce Committee in April 2025, Ortberg acknowledged the company had made "serious missteps" and committed to rebuilding safety culture from the production line up.
The company has since 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.
The Workforce Challenge
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.
Community Investment
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, it granted nearly $5 million to health and human services nonprofits across Washington State, including food banks, job-training programs, shelters, and workforce development initiatives.
Why Boeing Matters to CrowdSmith
The CrowdSmith Foundation is building a five-station maker facility on Portland Avenue in Tacoma—approximately twenty miles south of Boeing's Renton 737 assembly plant. The facility moves people through hand tools, power tools, digital fabrication, AI dialogue, and robotics. Participants earn one of five credential tracks through funded WIOA cohorts. The program is designed to produce the kind of worker Boeing needs and cannot currently find in sufficient numbers.
Workforce Pipeline
Boeing's manufacturing student programs recruit from community and technical colleges. CrowdSmith sits upstream of those programs—the facility where someone with mechanical aptitude but no formal training builds the foundational skills that make them eligible for Boeing's pipeline. A CrowdSmith graduate with a Fabrication credential has logged hours with hand tools, power tools, and digital fabrication equipment under direct supervision.
Geography
Twenty miles. Renton to Portland Avenue. The same labor market, the same transit corridors, the same community. Boeing's Puget Sound workforce draws from exactly the population CrowdSmith serves.
Training Philosophy
Boeing has added 550 hours of additional training and introduced competency evaluations before workers touch aircraft. CrowdSmith's five-station sequence is built on the same principle: you do not advance until you demonstrate competency at the current station. The hands come first. The assessment is observed, not self-reported.
The Skills Gap
Boeing's turnaround depends on hiring and training thousands of workers who can replace the institutional knowledge that walked out the door during the pandemic. CrowdSmith is not a degree program. It is a facility where people build real things with real tools under real supervision and earn credentials that reflect demonstrated ability.
Community Investment Alignment
ECF Puget Sound grants support workforce development nonprofits in the region. CrowdSmith is a 501(c)(3) operating in the Puget Sound, focused on workforce development, with a documented financial model and a facility in an Opportunity Zone.
929 Long Bridge Drive
Arlington, VA 22202
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 at approximately $5,000 per seat, financed through WorkForce Central under WIOA.
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. All three are receiving letters this week. Yours 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 financial models are available upon request. The building is not competing with your training programs. It is feeding them.
Robb Deignan
Founder & Executive Director
CrowdSmith Foundation
253-325-3301
The Twenty Miles
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.