Regional Development Corporation (RDC) serves as backbone for the Trades sector. Founded in 1996, the RDC is a private nonprofit 501(c)3 dedicated to improving economic development in Northern New Mexico. The RDC was initially established to serve as the Department of Energy Los Alamos Site “Community Reuse Organization” (CRO) with a mission is to diversify the economy within the north central New Mexico region. The RDC maintains a close working relationship with the Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and its affiliate contractors. It focuses on workforce development, investment opportunities, and technical assistance to facilitate job growth and to diversify the regional economy. It also serves as a facilitator to bring organizations together, offering training and job placement supports and drawing on extensive region-wide networks of union and employer partners. The RDC's Workforce and Academic Network Development pilot, which seeks to train workers in skilled trades and construction and has already accomplished significant groundwork building stakeholder trust, planning, and convening in the skilled trades. The RDC manages federal grants, having recently completed a $3.2 million workforce development grant from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. The RDC’s training work centers on the skilled trades, a sector where local employers report severe hiring gaps and where new employees can be trained quickly. The RDC seeks to develop a talent pipeline that can serve private and public organizations region-wide, an effort that is all the more critical now that the nation is gearing up to spend the largest investment in infrastructure in a lifetime, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.