An Interview with Susan Daly

VP of Strategy, RIMTA/Composites Alliance of Rhode Island

The Rhode Island Marine Trades Association (RIMTA) represents the recreational boating and marine industry in the state of Rhode Island. We support the full range of the supply chain for recreational boating covering boat design, marinas, charters, electronics, service and repair, professional sailors and crew and all the ancillary industries around it from insurance to clothing to publications. You name it, we’re here.

RIMTA’s charter is to position Rhode Island as a world leader in the marine trades industry. We also do a lot of economic development to help promote the companies and what they do. We work with state legislators, the state’s federal delegation, key influencers at the state house and with many of national organizations to help them understand what we’re doing here in Rhode Island.

The Composites Alliance of Rhode Island is an offshoot from RIMTA. It came about at the urging of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse because a lot of the companies that are involved in boatbuilding, which has a long heritage in Rhode Island, are very skilled and advanced with respect to working with composite materials. These range from fiberglass to carbon fiber and beyond. Part of their challenge starting in the 2000s was how could they expand outside of the recreational boatbuilding industry and apply it to new industries whether that be defense, medical, aviation, aerospace, automotive or wind—the full gamut.

Sen. Whitehouse has always been interested in what RIMTA does. He also was very aware of what was happening with composite materials. He suggested convening the composites companies and discussing what sort of opportunities there are and what could be done to really help them grow their businesses so that people outside of Rhode Island would be aware of their amazing capabilities. He’s been a great advocate of anything to do with the ocean, as has Rhode Island’s other senator, Jack Reed, who is very well respected in the defense sector.

I view RIMTA and the Composites Alliance as key component to Rhode Island’s Blue Economy. We have a responsibility to be intermediaries in order to advance these marine business sectors. Many of these companies are innovative, but they’re small, so we’re really there to help connect them to resources and funding.

We help them to connect with the Navy and the Naval Underwater Systems Center (NUWC), for example, which is a huge opportunity for a lot of the composites companies. Many of our companies know how to make things that go underwater and do it well, so they are well suited to working on UUVs and other underwater technologies. We also help them work with the universities, such as the University of Rhode Island (URI), connecting with the Coastal Resources Center and the Graduate School of Oceanography and working with the faculty and grad students. URI has a growing and strengthening capability in materials and composites. We’re at the center of all this and helping in this collaboration.

We also have a strong workforce development effort to make sure there is a pipeline of employees to the marine trades industry. We’re starting all the way down in fourth grade now to help programs fill that pipeline, as well as working with companies to secure funding for training through state and federal options.

RIMTA has been actively working on workforce development for more than 10 years. The state saw the importance of workforce development and took a more industry-focused approach to how to develop workforce programs and provide training. Rather than develop a training program and find out if the industry needs it, they asked industry what they needed and developed the appropriate training. We were one of the early industries in on that.

Even though we are virtually surrounded by water in Rhode Island, many of the kids in the local schools had no connection to the industry. We realized that we needed to get kids exposed and aware of the range of opportunities that are available in the Blue Economy. We started out at the entry level, working with incumbent workers and cross-training employees. Then we saw that we had to get into the schools. We started at colleges and high schools and then moved to middle schools and now we’re down to the elementary schools. We work with educational partners at all levels to develop summer programs; everything from giving kids a chance to build a boat to career exposure in high school and short-term entry levels programs. We’ve been asked at the national level to write guides on how you want to approach this. There’s such an extraordinary range of activities from the technical working with your hands to the scientific programs.

Recently, we have been increasingly realizing our responsibility to deal with the issues of sustainability and the environmental, which includes a myriad of things from how to deal with sea level rise to looking at recycling of materials such as shrink-wrap and fiberglass. We want to make sure that our oceans—our playgrounds, if you will—are healthy and in good shape.

Helping companies land and expand in Rhode Island,
we’re the state’s economic development agency.

The views and opinions expressed in this Offshore Source WebExclusive are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position held by the Offshore Source editorial team.
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