Under our Advanced Manufacturing Sector, our regional STEMbassadors program has won 2nd place in the 2020 Partnerships for Industry and Education (PIE) awards, which will be honored at the California Economic Summit dynamic virtual event on December 3-4. The PIE contest was founded to identify and honor innovative employer-education partnerships that are successfully preparing the workforce to meet the needs of the California economy.
STEMbassadors, Inc. is a student-led 501-C (3) company in the Ventura Unified School District. The company, which fills the educational need for applied STEM education in K-12 schools, reacted to the COVID-19 public health emergency in a dramatic way. It helped meet the need of the shortage of personal protective equipment – especially high-quality face shields– for medical professionals by transforming their training program into a production team to fabricate equipment with their 3-D printers. They partnered with local businesses and by April had met their initial goal of providing the face shields to the community health care providers.
As the project faculty lead, Alex Wulff commented, “Without the South Central Coast Regional partnership, STEMbassadors would not have been as successful fostering Advanced Manufacturing STEM skills for tomorrow’s workforce.”
