Long Beach Had a Problem.

A few years ago, Boeing closed its sprawling aircraft manufacturing plant in the Southern California city just outside Los Angeles, decimating the local economy. Thousands of jobs were lost, creating a vacuum in the workforce. But it wasn’t just Boeing’s closure putting Long Beach in a funk. The city’s downtown, once thriving, struggled to attract the kind of industry and entrepreneurship that had once ensured stable, nine-to-five employment for a large swath of the American population.

And yet there was reason for optimism. Long Beach—whose downtown was, at its core, still structurally solid—was home to a proud community of small businesses and enterprising young professionals. But they were having trouble connecting, as were the thousands of entrepreneurs moving to the greater Los Angeles area in search of meaningful work. What the city needed was to find out how many of these strivers there actually were, and how they could be brought together.

Enter Nick Schultz, executive director of Pacific Gateway, Long Beach’s workforce development task force. He conducted an in-depth examination of the city’s economic fabric, and what he found surprised him: around 30 percent of the local population—a loose agglomeration of freelancers and entrepreneurs, or “irregular workers,” as Schultz calls them—had found a way to operate in the crevices across the city’s economy.

It was the motherlode of economic potential, just waiting to be tapped. But at the time, Long Beach didn’t have the right mechanism in place to help these resilient entrepreneurs find work and, more importantly, a shared sense of community around work itself.