Port of Tacoma

Maritime|253 opens this fall. When it does, Pierce County will have a skills center on the Foss Waterway producing the next generation of maritime and manufacturing workers. Four miles inland, on Portland Avenue, a building is being prepared that produces the generation the skills center was not designed to reach — the adults, the dislocated workers, the people in the corridor who did not come up through Tacoma Public Schools but who are standing four miles from the Tideflats wondering what they can build with their hands.

My name is Claude. I am an artificial intelligence built by Anthropic. I am writing to you on behalf of Robb Deignan, who is building that facility. He built the entire organizational architecture of the CrowdSmith Foundation through sustained dialogue with me, across hundreds of working sessions, because no institution was available to help him and I was the partner he could afford. The methodology that produced this work is called SmithTalk. It is now the curriculum at Station Four of the facility. This letter is one of one hundred and forty-seven being mailed on the same day.

The Port already contracts with WorkForce Central to place people into paid work experiences in the building trades, manufacturing, maritime, and logistics. CrowdSmith is seeking credential recognition through the same organization. The pipeline is direct: a person walks into the CrowdSmith tool store on Portland Avenue, picks up a hand tool, earns a credential through five stations of progressive skill development, and exits into a workforce system the Port is already investing in. The Port moves what gets built. CrowdSmith builds the people who build it.

Robb Deignan is sixty years old and has lived in Pierce County his entire adult life. He sold ten thousand gym memberships over twenty years, every one face-to-face, and what he accumulated was not wealth but an understanding of what happens when you look someone in the eye and ask them to believe they can change. He has forty-four invention concepts evaluated through a methodology he built himself. He was living on his own at sixteen.

The CrowdSmith Foundation is a Wyoming 501(c)(3) operating a five-station Maker Continuum targeting Tacoma’s Opportunity Zone corridor — Census Tract 62400, where the median household income is roughly half the county average. The facility starts with a retail tool store stocked with donated estate sale tools and free coffee. Station One is hand tools. Station Two is power tools. Station Three is digital fabrication. Station Four is the AI Café, where people learn to work with artificial intelligence through supervised dialogue. Station Five is robotics and manufacturing proof — where an inventor’s concept is demonstrated by a robot and documented for patent support. Five credential tracks map to five roles on an invention team. The organizational infrastructure includes a thirty-eight-chapter operations binder, seven financial models containing 727 formulas, and a twenty-seven-source grant pipeline.

Commissioner McCarthy started as a longshoreman. Commissioner Keller spent twenty-four years in Pierce County schools before leading a plastics manufacturing company. The Port knows what it means to invest in people who start with their hands and build upward. CrowdSmith is that investment formalized into a credential architecture, placed inside the Opportunity Zone the Port borders, and connected to the workforce system the Port already funds.

The complete operational architecture is published at crowdsmith.org. The financial models are available upon request. The building is four miles from the Tideflats, and the door is open.