Alejandra Y. Castillo was the first woman of color to serve as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development. Castillo led the Economic Development Administration from 2021-2024, and has an extensive background in public service under the Biden, Obama, and Clinton administrations. This fall, Castillo joined Harvard’s Institute of Politics as a fellow. Castillo spoke with the HPR about her experiences in the EDA, how to further economic progress in an equitable manner, and how to address political inclusion in the United States.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review Given your work for the U.S. Economic Development Administration and your overall focus on technological innovation married with equity-driven economic policies, what were some of the initiatives you worked on that you are most proud of?
Alejandra Castillo: To begin, making sure that equity is one of our top investment priorities. Every time we designed a program, evaluated a grant submission, we were always making sure that the equity piece was at the core of it. We were really making sure that communities were coming together in a very inclusive way, asking the question, “Who’s at the table and who’s missing?” We made sure that our grants were also distributed across the country so that it wasn’t all urban, but that we also have representation from middle America, from Indigenous communities, from our territories.
I feel most proud of the fact that, when the EDA was entrusted with a very large amount of dollars, close to $1 billion, we were able to execute our mandate, on our mission, by ensuring that communities across the country are served. I feel proud that when Congress and the president entrusted us with a large amount of dollars, we were able to deploy those dollars in a way that touched all corners of our country and anchored itself around equity.
HPR: What were some of the biggest challenges in addressing these regional differences in economic development across the country?
AC: The challenge is that communities are at different levels of economic growth. At the same time, the opportunity is that communities are at different levels of economic growth. One of the changes that we did with regards to grants was to ensure the government wasn’t telling communities what to do. We actually turned it around and we designed the grant process by asking communities what they did and what they thought the economic arc of their communities was. It was a new way for the federal government to engage communities across the country and not be prescriptive.
It allowed communities, as President Biden likes to say, it allowed economic development from the bottom up to the middle out. That really was at the heart of what we did, but the challenge is that we are such a large and diverse country. Geographically diverse, also in terms of the terrain and industries and people and history. It’s not the same to do economic development in New York City, then to do it in Lubbock, Texas. Keeping that in mind is difficult because for decades the federal government took a one-size-fits-all approach — that never works. We have to listen and pay attention as well as allow communities to be the authors and the drivers of their own economic growth.
HPR: What do you think are some productive strategies that future politicians and leaders can do to kind of navigate this disillusionment that a lot of communities feel when it comes to receiving economic support?
AC: I think the economic development space is the most bipartisan topic there is. I have yet to find a politician that doesn’t want economic growth in their communities. They all want economic growth. The question is, “who is driving that economic growth?” This is the theme of this discussion.
The drivers of economic growth must be the community. Everyone from the public sector, the private sector, universities, colleges, philanthropy [need to be involved]. You also need to have young people, workforce boards, and the workforce development community. It has to be as holistic as possible because people need to buy in on that vision. If I’m a mayor, and I just espoused an economic agenda without having the buy-in of the community, it’s just a speech. It is when you have the buy-in of communities and community players and stakeholders that that economic agenda can be implemented.
It’s hard to do because sometimes people don’t agree and there are differing views, but at some point, you need to have that cohesive North Star to drive community growth.
HPR: Given your background, how exactly do you think we should kind of reconcile this race between technological innovations such as AI versus ensuring economic equity and protecting American jobs?
AC: I believe that the more you know of innovation and technology, the more you can enhance economic growth. I’ll give you a very concrete example. There’s a program that my former office did, it’s called the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, it was part of the American Rescue Plan. One of the awardees is in Fresno, California, an agrotech program. Now, if you hear it, you say “agrotech, does that mean we’re going to do away with farmers? Does that mean that we’re going to displace workers?”.
No. What that effort is doing is bringing in technology into farming. Not necessarily or exclusively to increase yield or crop production, but also to protect the well-being of our farm workers. Farm workers have on average 15 to 20 years less life expectancy. It’s hard work, so they’re looking at how they can bring in technology to support both industry and the workers.
We will always need human judgment, we will always need human creativity. Algorithms and computers and robots can do competitive work, but we need our workers who are able to be part of both the supply chain and improving processes. There is always a public perception that the existence of technology automatically means the displacement of workers.
In some cases that may happen, but it also presents opportunities. This is where we definitely need more workforce development that can help workers either pivot, reskill, or upskill so that they can actually continue to be in those industries if they choose to, or be able to enter industries of the future.
There’s a lot of focus right now on workforce development and it’s a great passion of mine. There are so many jobs in this country that are unfilled because we are unable to match the skill with the job. That’s why we need to reskill and upskill. But we need to have younger people know what the jobs of the future are. For example, if I were to say there are jobs in Rochester in photonics, people say, “Well, what is that?” If I were to say there are so many jobs in additive manufacturing, they say, “Well what does that mean?” In polymers and polymer manufacturing, they probably don’t know.
We need to have a national campaign to let young people know where they fit in these industries of the future. Developing drone technology, developing lithium manufacturing, there’s a lot of big growth that’s out there.
HPR: What are some industries we should emphasize for Generation Z?
AC: I’m happy to share with you just so many new technologies that are happening. Just to give you a case in point, right in Manchester, New Hampshire, we funded a project under the Tech Hubs program and it does organ manufacturing.
In my family, diabetes, kidney failure, and dialysis are major issues. Imagine if you could figure out ways to manufacture kidneys. In the Black and Brown community, that is monumental because we’re seeing so much of our health impacted by dialysis. It’s transformational in the sense of one, the technological and innovative breakthroughs. Two, how we’re also going to need individuals and people trained in those spaces. Sometimes these jobs do not require you to be a biotech PhD or an engineer, they may require some training in the trades.
When I mentioned photonics, think about everything that needs a camera. Our phones need a camera, there’s so much in the medical devices. It’s the combination of nanotechnology and photonics where you have smaller and smaller cameras that can go into the human body. We need cameras for drone technology.
The more we can expose young people to these opportunities and help them train and help them place in new jobs, I think we will be much more curious. Right now, there’s fear about technology, we need to break down that fear with education and training.
HPR: How do you plan to bring your background and personal experience as the daughter of a small business owner growing up in a working-class family to students at Harvard who also might come from similar backgrounds and want to get more involved in economic development?
AC: What I’d like to do as a practitioner is to bring the voice of places across the country. I grew up in New York City, but I also lived in a developing country. I lived in the Dominican Republic for seven years. I’ve traveled this country extensively; there’s only one state left I haven’t traveled to.
I’ve traveled to 49 states and two out of the seven territories. I want to bring those experiences into the classroom because, as wonderful as the Harvard environment is, it’s an outlier. It’s not the day-to-day experience of people, and part of what I’d like to do is to be able to help students stand in the shoes of the everyday American.
Stand in the shoes of living in a rural community where you are five miles away from the nearest gas station or sometimes your nearest neighbor. Stand in the shoes of places that have no broadband, stand in the shoes of communities where if you have kids, you can’t afford childcare. Stand in the shoes of a place where a big manufacturing company basically shut its doors and thousands of jobs were lost. Once they’re standing in those shoes, then how can we be creative in economic development? How do we bring in foreign direct investment? How do we embrace technology innovation?
It’s a journey, and what I’m interested in doing is to be able to help students understand that economic development is not linear, not a straight shot. You have to meander, you have to bring in people. It’s kind of rolling up your sleeves, being creative. If I can get them to get their fingers dirty in what economic development is, I would be very happy.
HPR: With the most recent election cycle, we have seen the media portray the notion that the elite left, in many ways, is kind of disconnected from the average ordinary person. There is this idea of them being unable to connect with families who just want to put food on the table and who are just trying to provide for their families. As someone who has worked in the past three Democratic presidential administrations, what do you think the Democratic Party as a whole can do to bridge this divide and unite more people?
AC: When you look and you open the curtains, from a policy perspective, the Democrats have been really about these communities. The work that the president did early on with helping to bring down the cost of gasoline which was huge. The number of job creations, the number of grants that are going to communities all across the country, the ability to build capacity, education, he’s been working a lot on making sure that student loan debt is addressed, there’s been a lot of challenges on that, bringing the cost of child care down, looking at how to increase wages, those are day to day issues.
In my previous job, I did a lot of work in natural disaster recovery. Whether it’s a hurricane, a tornado, fires, we need to continue to stand in the shoes of people — because only when you stand in the shoes of people, only when you build that empathy, can you really advocate for folks. I think in so many ways, I’ve been a long time Democrat because of that — because I strongly believe that both the administration and the Democratic Party can speak on that.
We don’t know how to tell the story, and unfortunately, the media tells the story for us.
