In Spring semester 2001 some students in Economics 309 chose to research employment and income generated in each of the industry clusters identified in the Prosperity economic development plan for Humboldt County. I would like to offer special thanks to Anita Alexander of the Employment Development Department (EDD) in Eureka for providing many hours of her time, expertise, and patience in this project. Anita and EDD were also instrumental in providing the data used by the students in this project. I would like to acknowledge the support and helpful suggestions made by those faculty colleagues and staff in the Service Learning Fellows Program at Humboldt State University during Spring semester 2001. It is my hope that these indicators might help provide a context and perhaps a baseline for employment and income in these clusters, and help people develop a better understanding of their relative size, recent trends, and prospects for the future. Since the Prosperity plan explicitly draws linkages between economy, community, and environment, my students likewise made an effort to objectively draw out linkages between the industry cluster they studied and relationships with community and environment.

Steven Hackett
Associate Professor
School of Business and Economics
Humboldt State University
sh2@humboldt.edu