Pittsburgh Local Lab

Background

Mechanism’s Local Labs make visible the challenges and opportunities for starting, scaling, and sustaining production-based businesses. Our process allows manufacturing business owners and workers to work with and alongside each other and a wide variety of industry, intermediary, and community stakeholders, regardless of age, citizenship, and identity. The Local Lab process intentionally brings them all together to better understand and envision the collective benefits and impacts manufacturing can have on a region.

Successful Labs co-create, co-design, and build new resources, services, systems, and policies that better support local manufacturers, leading to more thriving and resilient workers, businesses, communities, and regions.

Phases

Local Labs have three phases: Learn, Design, and Build.

Goals & Objectives

From January to September 2026, Mechanism will organize and lead a community engagement process to gather and synthesize input from diverse stakeholders. This process will include: individual and small group interviews to gather insights from food and beverage manufacturers in and around Pittsburgh and their supporters and in-person events to workshop and develop ideas for strategies and solutions.

At the conclusion of this project, Mechanism, along with Pittsburgh-based partners, will generate recommendations for strategies and actions to help start, scale, and sustain production-based businesses in the region.

Community-Driven Engagement Process

An intentional community engagement effort is needed in order to accurately capture the existing needs and identify effective solutions to strengthen local production. Mechanism’s process brings together industry and community stakeholders, including manufacturers and makers, capital providers, economic development, and other support organizations. This engagement process leads to clarity on challenges and opportunities while also fostering new connections in the region and building traction, momentum, and local buy-in for future work.

Recommendations

Taking collective action requires clarity on where and how to invest, including time, social capital, and financial resources. Recommendations for actions – new strategies, initiatives, investments, and shared resources – helps establish a shared vision of what support can look like, helping stakeholders move forward on industry and community vetted solutions.

For an example of this, take a look at our recommendations from our Asheville Local Lab.

Local Lab Snapshot

A project of this scale and scope can be difficult to communicate clearly. The Pittsburgh Local Lab Snapshot makes it easier to communicate the history of the industry, overview, and outcomes of the engagement process, and the set of recommendations. The Snapshot is intended for use, after the Phase is over, by project participants to engage with supporters, including funders, elected officials, decision makers, and the surrounding community.

Forthcoming