Partners for Growth: Andrew Deye MC/MPA 2015 is working to bring jobs back to Ohio

THINK OF SEATTLE, AND WHAT COMES TO MIND? It might depend a little on your generation (Gates and Cobain or Bezos and Macklemore), but you get the point—a young city, on the cutting edge, with global tech companies. The sort of place you might think about moving to.

Now think about Ohio. That, in a sense, is what Andrew Deye MC/MPA 2015 works on every day. Not marketing or branding, necessarily, although that is part of it. What he does is help build cities and communities and the state into something new. Seattle, after all, wasn’t always Seattle. In 1971, unemployment was 13 percent, and the economy was more steel and lumber than digital and coffee.

Deye is managing director of strategy and business development for JobsOhio, a private nonprofit tasked with bringing jobs and investment to the state by attracting, and keeping, businesses.

For Deye, JobsOhio, which he joined right after graduating from the Kennedy School, represented an opportunity to pursue his interest in public-private partnerships. The organization’s achievements so far include successful projects with more than 1,600 companies since 2011, involving 140,000 new job commitments, along with more than 400,000 jobs retained. But beyond the impressive numbers, this has also been an opportunity for him to do something with greater social impact after an early career spent in investment banking, and to help rebuild and reinvent his native state.

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