SouthWorks Hosts Career Academy, Upcoming Open House
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Photo by Jaime Cone Hughes
Tommy Hayward (left), training coordinator for UA Local 81 plumbers, steamfitters and HVAC technicians, supervises Groton High School student Nick Sill as he welds two pipes together at SouthWorks Thursday while Graeme Crispbell, also a Groton High School student, looks on.
The cavernous factory floor of an industrial manufacturer, vacant since 2012, was brought to life with the sounds of hammers, blow torches and young, enthusiastic learners on July 24 for the Groton Central School District Career Academy.
This pop-up academy is just one of several career-building initiatives to find a new home in SouthWorks. The public will soon have the opportunity to meet the leaders hoping to jump start the area’s workforce and to see the unique spaces they will inhabit, alongside other eventual tenants, including restaurants, stores and small-scale manufacturers.
SouthWorks, a new Ithaca community centered around the renovation of the old factory on South Hill, will host its second annual open house on Aug. 12 from 3 to 7 p.m.
High schools get a chance for real-life experience in the trades
The summer career program, now in its second year, is in conjunction with the STEAM Lab at Groton High School, where students can have a hands-on learning experience in a number of fields, including agriculture, health sciences, communications and more.
There are seven different summer academies, ranging in careers from public safety to veterinary medicine, and many students sign up for more than one.
“The whole idea behind [the academies] is to give kids experience and exposure in careers that they think that they’re interested in,” said Billie Downs, district administrator and career center director for Groton Central School District. “We do a lot of prep work and reflection on who they are. So, they’ll look at their values and their skill set and even their lifestyle preferences, to have this experience and be able to reflect back and be like, ‘Oh, that really fits who I am as a person and my skill set, and I really enjoy it’ — to try to find that area to start exploring.”
On Thursday, SouthWorks hosted the academy’s three-day Skilled Trade School, where students in grades 10 through 12 learned how to weld pipes, among other skills.
“They chose to do it here at SouthWorks this year, both because we have the wide-open spaces for the unions to set up, and we have construction that we’re doing for the FOUND space,” said Sarah Barden, SHIFT Capital’s community outreach and leasing coordinator for SouthWorks, explaining that in the afternoon the students would visit the FOUND construction site.
The students did station rotations with members of local unions, learning skills from plumbers, pipe setters, electricians, masons and sheet metal workers. Each 20-minute activity was designed to give the students a taste of what life on the job would be like in the different trades.
In the workshop led by Tommy Hayward, training coordinator for UA Local 81 plumbers, steam fitters and HVAC technicians, students took in some simple but very specific instructions and watched a quick demonstration by Hayward. By the time they were finished, the three students in the group had all successfully welded two small pipes together.
The students are mostly from Groton, but Downs would like to see the program expand into other communities, as well. Already there are some students participating from Cortland, Dryden, Lansing and Ithaca.
“I think the pipe dream would be that this becomes a statewide program for students to do during the summers,” Downs said.
“It’s fun to see the insights that they gain. I had, last year, a health sciences student that wanted to be an ultrasound technician. We went to the vet school, and she said, ‘Oh, I can do this at the vet school. I like animals way better than other people,’” Downs added with a laugh.
The students are paid $200 for the three days of the program, in order to make the opportunity competitive with summer jobs.
“It’s been a really great opportunity to come and talk to professionals, and it gives us a better, more well-rounded look at what it actually means to go and do this on a day-to-day basis,” said Groton High School student Adelina Biglietta. “I love being able to learn like this, studying with other professionals, because sometimes there’s questions that teachers can’t answer.”
So far, she is perhaps most interested in pursuing a career in plumbing, and she left the workshop on Thursday with a list of local apprenticeships that included the starting pay for each position and information about how to apply.
“It gives us a clear next step,” Biglietta said. “You can call and ask about the apprenticeship once you get out of high school.”
Marcus Williamee, a business agent for the plumbers and steamfitters of UA Local 81, said people can find a lasting career in the trades that is lucrative and allows plenty of opportunities for advancement.
“There’s a lot of benefits in learning a skill and being able to do it not only during the day for a contractor, but for your family or on the side,” he said. “Installing heating and cooling systems is something that’s never going to go away. It’s always going to be needed.”
“It’s probably not going to be taken over by AI computer systems in the future,” Williamee added. “It’s always going to require some form of human component to be able to do the installation.”
Photo by Jaime Cone Hughes
Adelina Biglietta (left), Groton High School student, makes engraved keychains out of sheet metal with Lena Brehm, an intern for the Groton Central School District Career Academy.
An incubator of career opportunities
In Building 21, located at the top of Turner Place, several tenants will be working at the SouthWorks Empowerment Center to help build the local workforce by providing pathways for people interested in working in the skilled trades. The building will be home to a construction incubator and workforce development training space managed collaboratively by Livingston Associates and Ascend Workforce Solutions.
Nonprofit Ascend Workforce Solutions works within the community “to bridge what we call ‘the missing middle,’” said Melissa Suchodolski, president of USC Builds and chair of the board for Ascend Workforce Solutions.
She said the goal of the nonprofit is “taking individuals that are interested in construction trades and connecting them to employers that are desperately seeking workers, and then mapping what the skill building and the personal and professional development pathway needs to be so that they’re truly employable.”
“Nationwide, we lack 500,000 skilled workers in the construction industry,” Suchodolski said, “and in Ithaca, as you can see, there’s a lot of construction happening and a lot of development at SouthWorks and the surrounding area, as well.”
In Building 21, on the lower level, there will be a construction lab where people can have tools in hand, working in a simulated construction environment “very similar to what you see here,” Suchodolski said, but with a classroom space for general instruction. She likened the experience to a “pre-apprenticeship.”
On the upper floor there will be construction employers.
“So the opportunity is for the employers to inform the training, to be able to inform that instruction, get to know those training cohorts and then start to talk about some of the job opportunities that exist,” Suchodolski explained.
“And,” she added, “the hope is those employers are already working on this campus.” This gives potential employees the opportunity to transition directly from their pre-apprenticeship experience to a SouthWorks project already in progress.
The efforts of Ascend aim to help eliminate some barriers to employment, such as transportation and child care. SouthWorks is on a TCAT bus line, and a new day care facility on site will create 144 new child care spaces, thanks to First Learning, a day care operator based in Rochester.
“They’re going to ensure that there are spots for all of the trainees, so that while they’re going through the training, they don’t have to worry about day care on a different site. It will all be in the one building,” said Clair Schroeder, executive director of Ascend Workforce, adding that once an employee is hired after they finish training, their child can then stay in the same day care, providing stability for the family.
Schroeder clarified that Ascend does not try to push trainees toward taking a union job versus a nonunion one.
“We want to make sure that [participants] go towards a path that feels right for them,” she said.
Image provided
A rendering of the SouthWorks project once it’s finished. The new Ithaca neighborhood will have housing, restaurants, employment opportunities, a day care and more.
A new home for FOUND is just the beginning
In the afternoon, the students got to tour the active construction site that will be FOUND in Ithaca’s new location. Recently, the storefront had new windows installed, a very exciting early step in the construction process, Barden said.
“When we walked in and we had our building permit on the door, I almost cried,” she said. “It was so exciting. It was our first building permit.”
Barden is hoping that the upcoming open house will attract people who are interested in SouthWorks’ rich history, as Tompkins Cortland Community College photography professor Harry Littell is planning on making a coffee table book of new and historical photos.
“It’s a little bit of a retrospective on the history of the buildings, and then documenting them as they transition,” Barden said. “He is currently doing interviews with folks who used to work in the factory. Last year, we had a dozen or more folks who used to work here, or their parents worked here, come and join us on the tours. We hope those folks will come back so they can sign up to be interviewed with Harry, so that we can memorialize their stories and ultimately work them into the fabric of this, with QR codes or something, that when folks are traversing through the site, they’ll be able to hear from folks who built their careers here.”
No appointment is necessary to attend the open house, though RSVPs through this form are appreciated: https://shorturl.at/UBM74.
Site tours will run every hour. Closed-toed shoes without heels are required to attend the tour.
CORRECTION: This article has been changed from its original version to reflect a correction. Melissa Suchodolski is president of USC Builds and chair of the board for Ascend Workforce Solutions. Tompkins Weekly regrets the error.