Governor Newsom announces statewide plan for economic growth, $245 million for more jobs — with additional investment for LA’s recovery

Funding for economic and workforce development 

Along with the Jobs First Economic Blueprint, the Governor’s announced key investments in the state’s efforts to grow the economy and create job opportunities, including:

✅ $125 million grant solicitation to support new “ready-to-go” projects aligned to the state’s strategic sectors, ensuring that every region across California continues to play a critical role in the sustainable growth of the world’s fifth-largest economy. 

✅ $15 million grant solicitation for economic planning, pre-development, and implementation projects for California Native American tribes. 

✅ $52 million for new apprenticeships through the Apprenticeship Innovation Fund with a focus on high-demand sectors such as finance, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare.

✅ $16 million for pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship funding for young people ages 16-24 through the California Opportunity Youth Apprenticeship (COYA) grant program. This funding supports pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs that provide hands-on, real-world job training for young people who are often neither working nor in school.

✅ $24.1 million in High Road Training Partnership funds to 10 projects statewide to train people for jobs to meet California’s most urgent healthcare needs, with a focus on behavioral health and nursing. LA recipients include the Center for Caregiver Advancement, which is training home-health workers to be prepared for disasters such as the Los Angeles fires.

Supporting recovery and rebuilding in LA

Today, the Governor received the Los Angeles Jobs First Collaborative’s regional plan as part of his continued tour of the state’s thirteen economic regions, and announced new support to aid in LA’s rebuilding and recovery efforts:

✅ $10 million on behalf of the State, LA Rises, Maersk and APM Terminals to the LA Region Small Business Relief Fund, a grant program run by the City and County of LA that will be critical in rebuilding fire-impacted communities.  This is the first investment by LA Rises, the unified recovery effort launched by the Governor in January and led by Dodgers Chairman Mark Walter, business leader and basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and Casey Wasserman. 

✅ $3 million for the Los Angeles Jobs First Collaborative in their recovery efforts for the region, including for the launch of public-facing campaigns to promote small business support and the addition of capacity for near-term business and economic recovery. 

California Jobs First: Bold vision, realized locally

In 2021, Governor Newsom launched a statewide economic development planning process called the Community Economic Resilience Fund (CERF), which was later renamed the Regional Investment Initiative under the banner of California Jobs First in 2023. The objective was to create good-paying, accessible jobs and sustainable economic growth across the state’s thirteen regions.

Each region created a planning body — or collaborative — with representation from a wide variety of community partners, including labor, business, local government, education, environmental justice, community organizations, and more. The collaboratives then wrote their own data-driven, community-led economic plans, including identifying strategic industry sectors.

To support this process, California has invested $287 million since 2022, including $5 million per region for planning, $39 million for pilot projects across the state and $14 million per region to develop viable projects that advance their strategic sectors.

In March 2024, Governor Newsom announced the creation of the California Jobs First Council, made up of nine Cabinet-level agencies, focused on streamlining the state’s economic and workforce development programs to create more family-supporting jobs and prioritize industry sectors for future growth.

California’s Economic Blueprint

The California Jobs First Economic Blueprint guides the state’s investments in key sectors to drive sustainable economic growth, innovation, and access to good-paying jobs over the next decade. Made up of ten strategic industry sectors, this framework will help streamline the state’s economic, business, and workforce development programs to create more jobs, faster. 

The state’s thirteen economic regions engaged more than 10,000 local residents and experts who collectively identified these sectors as key to driving local economies into the future.