National Woods Board promotes mission at AWFS

Volunteer members of the National Woods Board attended the AWFS Fair in July where they promoted and educated attendees about the goals of the new non-profit organization in its efforts to provide a better supply of skilled workers in the woodworking manufacturing industry.

“The board was founded about a year-and-a-half ago by industry representatives from manufacturing and education sectors with the idea and the mission to replicate and proliferate the model of the MiLL (Manufacturing Industry Learning Labs), a technical trade school in Colorado Springs (Colo.), to make it accessible and scalable for all education programs throughout the country,” says board chairman Thomas Allott.

“The biggest challenge that we see right now is that there’s no branch between manufacturing and education. Education doesn’t know how to talk to manufacturing and manufacturing doesn’t know how to talk to education, but they both have a need and a demand. The issue on the education side is they have students but don’t have the resources of manufacturing experts, and the manufacturing side needs workers with skills and expertise. So, the National Woods Board is really that bridge that will help connect industry and education together.”

The board currently has about 10 members spread throughout the country who meet two to three times a year.

Allott emphasizes that the board is not necessarily focused on recreating the MiLL, but is interested replicating its core principles.

“The idea is that we have the curriculum that the industry knows will work for their future employees, but we also have the support network to connect industry and education together,” he says. “We know that the MiLL will not be 100 percent replicated anywhere in the country. We hope we can, but the idea is that we could maybe get somewhere on a smaller scale with that. Maybe they take a portion of what the MiLL is doing and put it into their local industry.”

Allot adds a majority of the board’s members were influential in getting the MiLL started, including Dean Mattson.

“What we are trying to do is be sure that our board is balanced, so we have input from education and input from industry, because we don’t know how to talk each other’s language right now and we need to. We will continue expanding as we make progress,” Allott says.

For more, visit nationalwoodsboard.org.  

This article was originally published in the September 2023 issue.