Lee Wellington is the founding executive director of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance (UMA), a national nonprofit that builds robust, inclusive manufacturing sectors in more than 250 cities across the United States. Through a mix of collaborative research and ecosystem building, and under Lee’s leadership, UMA has become nationally recognized for knowledge transfer across public agencies and community-based organizations. She has led the UMA team in building national learning communities on a range of issues, including access to capital, community-embedded workforce programming, and mission-driven industrial real estate development. In 2018, Lee guided UMA’s flagship research project, the State of Urban Manufacturing, a six-city study on small-scale manufacturing involving multiple Federal Reserve banks, research universities, and hundreds of local manufacturing practitioners. Lee is a frequent presenter on urban manufacturing at conferences nationally and internationally, including Berlin’s Urban Tech Summit, The White House’s National Week of Making, the International Business Innovation Association’s Conference on Business Incubation, and the National League of Cities’ City Summit.
Prior to UMA, Lee worked in the public sector at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Industrial and Manufacturing Businesses and the New York City Council, at nonprofit planning organizations including the Pratt Center for Community Development and the Waterfront Alliance, and at legal services organizations, including the Urban Justice Center’s Street Vendor Project and South Brooklyn Legal Services.
Lee holds a JD from Brooklyn Law School, an MS in city and regional planning from Pratt Institute, and a BS in economics from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
