I was in high school in the early 1990s when the timber town where I grew up took it on the chin. Mill closures and job losses left workers and families who had done everything right scrambling just to survive. Local stores struggled, schools tightened budgets, and public services shrank. For many, lost paychecks led to lost faith in the system in the country.
During 12 years in Congress and now at The Rockefeller Foundation, I have seen that my hometown is similar to too many others. More than 50 million Americans live in economically distressed communities, marked by inadequate jobs, poorer health outcomes, higher crime, and frayed civic life.
We tend to lose sight of those distressed communities because overall job numbers are excellent. Last week’s data showed that unemployment is at its lowest point since 2022. Nationally, what’s called prime-age employment — jobs for those between 25 and 54 — hovers around 80%. But that masks deep geographic fractures. In about one-third of American counties, prime-age employment lags the national average by five percentage points or more — the definition of a “distressed community.” When prime-age employment is weak, the damage compounds: fewer paychecks, a smaller tax base, and a growing sense that hard work does not lead anywhere.
People in those communities aren’t doing anything wrong — they’re just not living in the right place. Economic opportunity in the United States has become astonishingly concentrated. In 2020, just over a hundred of America’s 3,000-plus counties accounted for half of all U.S. job growth.
Communities that never fully recovered from previous economic shocks risk falling even further behind as artificial intelligence reshapes work. While technology has always changed jobs, the speed and scale of AI are different, and people sense it. A Gallup survey finds that nearly one in four workers using AI say it’s “very” or “somewhat” likely that AI and automation will eliminate their job.
So, how do we get more Americans working amid this level of economic change? Communities, working with states, employers, and federal partners, need to leverage new breakthroughs in how we get people connected to, and able to stay in, jobs.
First, we need to take place seriously, but differently than before. Traditional place-based strategies helped attract investment into communities, often by landing marquee employers or large capital projects. In many cases, that mattered. But too often, those strategies assumed opportunity would automatically reach local workers.
What’s different now is that access to work depends less on where investment lands and more on whether local systems actually connect people to jobs. In communities making progress today, workforce agencies align training with real hiring commitments, employers help shape local pipelines, and practical barriers like childcare and transportation are treated as part of the jobs system, not afterthoughts.
Second, jobs policy can’t stop at job creation. The U.S. economy has millions of open jobs, especially in healthcare, construction, and the care economy. Many go unfilled because workers lack access to short, job-aligned training to give them new or updated skills that match what employers are actually hiring for. Other times, workers are sidelined by practical barriers outside the workplace — like childcare, transportation, geographic distance, or unpredictable schedules. Communities making progress focus on alignment, not just supply. Training programs are designed with employers so credentials lead directly to hiring. Employers invest in retention and advancement, not just recruitment. And work-enabling infrastructure, especially childcare and benefits systems, is treated as part of the jobs system, because without it, people can’t reliably show up to work or stay attached as jobs change.
Take my hometown on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where communities long anchored by timber and natural-resource jobs have faced a slow, uneven transition. In some places, prime-age employment lags the national average by double digits. In response, local leaders have not chased one-off projects. Rather, they have organized a coordinated response that aligns workforce development, economic development, and supportive services around a simple goal: connecting people to existing jobs and emerging opportunities in maritime work, manufacturing, clean energy, and natural resources. That includes employer-driven training through the local community college, modern workforce partners that help people navigate transitions, and investments that reduce barriers like childcare and transportation.
Third, we need to modernize how we respond to disruption. Too many workforce systems — the combination of employers, training providers, public agencies, and benefits programs that connect people to jobs — were designed for a world in which job loss was episodic and recovery followed a relatively predictable path through retraining and re-entry. That is not the world AI is pushing us toward. The likelier reality is more frequent job transitions, faster task changes inside existing jobs, and shorter tenures. The risk is not only layoffs. It’s weakened attachment: when a worker encounters a disruption, falls out of the labor market, and struggles to climb back in.
AI will certainly eliminate some jobs. But it can also help workers move faster into new ones. Used well, AI can help people understand which roles are growing in their region, how their existing skills translate to those jobs, and what short, credible steps — often weeks or months, not years — lead to real hiring.
Employers need incentives and support to redeploy workers into new roles as tasks change, rather than defaulting to layoffs and rehiring. States should focus less on whether someone qualifies as “unemployed” and more on how quickly people move from one job to the next — by modernizing benefits and workforce services so workers can bridge transitions without losing income, health coverage, or momentum.
Philanthropy plays a distinct role by providing risk capital — testing approaches government and employers are often unable or unwilling to try first, from AI-enabled job navigation to new models designed around transitions rather than layoffs. When those approaches prove durable, states and employers are better positioned to adopt and scale them.
If large parts of the country continue to feel left behind, the consequences will continue to worsen. Economic exclusion erodes trust. Public trust in government is already near historic lows, especially pronounced in places where economic distress is persistent and where government often shows up more as an obstacle than as a partner.
But if we invest in people and places, adapt to technological change, and insist that opportunity be broadly shared, we can renew faith in the American Dream. The data show that communities that align employers, workforce systems, and practical supports have helped people get back to work and stay there, even amid economic disruption.
Progress is possible if communities fight for their people. I believe they will, because it is in times of great change and uncertainty that the American Dream has always been most worth fighting for, and most often renewed.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
