The Business Expansion and Retention (BEAR) program will hold a general meeting on Thursday, October 27 at 8:00 am in the Jennifer Leavitt Student Center located on the USU-Eastern campus titled Manifesting Manufacturing as Your Preferred Future.

The idea of the meeting is to first, inform people in the area about the Utah Cluster Acceleration Partnership grant and its specifics. “We have a UCAP Grant that we’re in cooperation with the Utah Manufactures Association. The project itself and what we will help will bring collaboration and cooperation among our industries and our government agencies, and certainly Utah State University-Eastern campus right here in Price. We believe we got the technical education programs that will serve as the foundation in meeting the needs of industry growth in training and further development and certainly in the business side of manufacturing,” stated Dr. Gary Straquadine. The grant comes on the heels of the recent visits of Aerospace companies that are looking to possible use current companies in the area to help with their manufacturing needs.

The UCAP program is designed to strengthen collaboration between education, industry, and economic development. Straquadine added, “We see our Utah State University Eastern campus right here in Price as the epicenter for what we can do with training and development. Citizens whether you need new training or re-training or whether you need to sharpen your saw and get some development work done in a sense. We see hopefully bringing in together the academic courses, the internship experiences, the apprentice type experiences that turn out valuable employees or make employers sharpened and more aware of the opportunities might be.”

The UCAP grant that has been received is in its infant stages, but the focus at this point is to get the information out to the community. “Right now we are just talking it up in the community through our BEAR Association but we need to get the information out to the community see if we can have people come in. This is just the first of many meeting to come, this is our launch pad in a sense as we’re going to take off here in October and follow up with meeting in November, December and activities in the Spring related to Make Manufacturing your future,” said Straquadine.

If you would like to know more about the BEAR general meeting contact their office at 613-5255, or to learn more about the UCAP program contact Center for Workforce Development at 613-5440.