— We would like to acknowledge the passing of Lynn Grossman, long time Board Director and friend to the Elmezzi family. After a long battle with cancer, Lynn withdrew to a new life on January 12, 2024. The work of the Foundation was deeply influenced by Lynn’s passion for uplifting the under resourced and underserved to a standard of living where they could not only survive, but thrive. Her absence is felt deeply by us all and we will continue to honor her legacy through our work in the community.—

Like much of the time that has passed since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2023 felt like it simultaneously came and went in the blink of an eye and packed itself with years worth of learnings. At the Foundation, we experienced both sensations quite acutely in the process of deepening our workforce development portfolio.

At our first ever Elmezzi Workforce Development Grantee Convening held in February, we brought together executive and program staff from our grantee organizations and invited them to get to know one another, understand the Foundation’s grantmaking, and discuss areas where we could all work together to produce better outcomes for our community. The day was filled with lively discussions on the importance of participant voice and struggles across the sector with recruitment and retention. To build on the momentum from this day, we made plans to convene once more at the end of the year to reconnect over the year of program implementation and realign on our overall vision. In October, we hosted our workforce development grantees for the second time to learn more from each other as well as our neighbors in other parts of the city about shared challenges in workforce development. We acknowledge that we can’t solve every issue that arises but we do have the ability to work together to be transparent and lean on each other for idea generation/best practice sharing, referrals, and deeper collaboration. As we fortify our network of stakeholders and service providers, we remain committed to staying responsive to the changes in the economic landscape in order to ensure that people in our communities are trained for and placed in careers with economic mobility. 

In 2023, we also introduced a few new grantees into our community including Solar One and Sunnyside Community Services in addition to deepening our relationship with existing grantee organizations. To date, the Foundation has committed nearly $3,000,000 to providing strong workforce development programs to residents of Long Island City and Astoria. The current grant portfolio includes ten local and citywide organizations whose specialities range from providing specialized training in the construction/green energy sector to educating college-bound youth on the various career pathways available to them. Each of these grants target their recruitment towards underserved and underrepresented New Yorkers and has directly led to positive career outcomes for nearly four hundred residents of LIC/Astoria.

Our Workforce Leaders Committee continued to provide a space for us to ideate about the workforce development field and learn from each other’s niche knowledge wells whether that be as a former participant of a workforce training program or a strategic advisor with experience at the intersection of government, nonprofits and the private sector. As we embark on this new year, the Foundation intends to use the learnings from the WLC, grantee convenings and grantee organizations themselves to further refine the meaning of impactful grantmaking. While ‘moving the needle’ in the workforce development sector requires much patience, the Foundation’s commitment to deepening their grantee relationships and investments allows for innovations to flourish. The hope for such relationship building is also to identify where the Foundation can be more strategic in the workforce development grantmaking space. 

Over the past several years, we have learned how important it is to listen to and understand the opportunities and challenges our community of grantees come up against in their daily work. We also seek to have the highest impact possible on our Western Queens footprint and by bringing together organizations to collaborate, we hope to continue facilitating broader and deeper change.