Kern's B3K Prosperity economic collaboration has taken another step past its origins as a cross-county working group with the addition last month of three part-time employees assigned to carry out specific job-creation strategies.
Senior Project Manager Cristina Bennett, Project Manager Justin Powers and Program Coordinator Alexia Svejda joined B3K's only other employee — Executive Director JP Lake, also a part-timer — a little less than a year after B3K reorganized to formalize functions that had been developed by local committees starting in early 2020.
The new employees have arrived at a critical time of growth and expansion: B3K has helped launch several initiatives that, while supported by public and private stakeholders, might not progress in a timely way without someone on the ground coordinating activity.
Lake said in a news release he looks forward to the energy, capabilities and enthusiasm all three will bring to B3K.
"Their diverse backgrounds and networks cut across the region, and I'm excited to see the progress we make with them supporting our implementation work," he said in the release.
Bennett's focus is on supporting B3K's participation in a local coalition led by the Kern Community College District applying for tens of millions of dollars from the state Community Economic Resilience Fund.
Bennett, a Mexico native and area operations manager for Amazon who earned a bachelor's degree at Cal State Bakersfield before going on to achieve a master's in business administration, will also work with stakeholders in B3K's advanced manufacturing and energy and carbon management implementation teams.
Powers is a technologist and entrepreneur who has led business startup classes at Kernville Cowork, which he founded. His focus will be business services and entrepreneurship, including establishing more startup courses on the county's eastern and western periphery.
Svejda, part-time executive director of the California City Chamber of Commerce who previously worked with county government on economic development in eastern Kern, will be responsible for assisting B3K's aerospace initiative. She also is assigned to help shepherd the larger organization's talent-to-industry workforce development programs.
She called the hiring activity, along with continuing work on the different projects, signs of progress at B3K.
"It's exciting to see an initiative, a report, call it what you want, not just seeing it sit on the shelf collecting dust," she said Friday.
One development has been the broad embrace of an aerospace "storefront" that, as envisioned by B3K's participants in eastern Kern, would boost innovation and create jobs by helping local small businesses commercialize technologies pioneered at Edwards Air Force Base and Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.
"That has interest across the board," she said, adding the idea is to locate the storefront somewhere off one of east Kern's military bases. "By having it off base, now it's accessible."
Originally a response to regulatory and market factors hurting the county's oil and ag industries, B3K was guided early on the Brookings Institution and supported financially by state and local government. It started with organizational work, and after a deep assessment of Kern's best opportunities for economic growth, followed by strategic planning, its big goal now is to create 100,000 new quality jobs by 2031.
The organization continues to evolve, spokesman Justin Salters said by email. Kern Community Foundation serves as its fiscal agent while B3K works toward having its own nonprofit entity by about the middle of this year, he said.
B3K expects to influence the region's long-term trajectory with sustainable programs that lift up Bakersfield and the rest of Kern County, Salters noted.
"Adding these key project and program staff is a significant step in that direction," he wrote.