Jobs Program in Chelsea Hopes to Triple Number of People It Helps over Next 2 Yrs

Chelsea and Greenwich Village, with their super-expensive apartments, booming office developments, and glittering High Line, might not be the first neighborhoods to come to mind as having an employment problem.

But that is exactly the point. Ken Jockers says neighborhood residents come in regularly to Hudson Guild community service agency on West 26th Street, where he is executive director, looking for help finding work.

“There are a significant number of people who are regularly looking for work in the area,” said Jockers. “Weekly. Regularly. People who have demonstrated they want to work.”

Most of them, but not all, Jockers explained, live in the Elliott and Chelsea houses, the NYCHA low-income development that was once on the far edge of Manhattan but is now surrounded by some of the priciest real estate in the world.

“In my experience I see and hear people talking about the economy, and things are more expensive, and certainly here along the West Side that’s even more pronounced, right? This is an incredibly expensive corridor of New York City. No revelations there.”

It is the quintessential New York tale distilled to its most striking contradictions. New Yorkers scrapping to get by amid the staggering wealth of the Great City.

Jockers decided to try to address this mismatch, encouraged by City Council Member Erik Bottcher to team up with Greenwich House and the New York City Employment and Training Coalition in a program to train and place neighborhood residents in local jobs.

“There has been a lot of economic development on the West Side of Manhattan, but historically the benefits of that economic development haven’t reached all constituents,” said Bottcher. “Particularly residents of public housing. There is a stark contrast in Chelsea between the haves and the have-nots. Across the street from Google you have people living without jobs and opportunities. Across the street from Hudson Yards, you have people living without jobs and opportunity. That needs to change.”

Matching job seekers to jobs is critical to disrupting multigenerational poverty, Bottcher said.

Greg Morris of the city training coalition says other neighborhoods, where the need for jobs has been more apparent, have far more developed job training and placement programs.

“That is an extraordinarily, in some pockets, well-resourced Zip code of businesses who have not always made a priority focusing on hiring local talent,” said Morris. “The West Side of Manhattan, unlike other parts of the city, doesn’t have a stand-alone structure.”

That is because the West Side “isn’t thought of as under-resourced,” Morris said. “But the reality is there are folks who are struggling on the West Side” even as global companies relocated to the neighborhood and local businesses in the area boomed.

That is the mismatch the new jobs program is hoping to overcome.

“There have been remarkable changes,” Morris says of the neighborhood’s economic boom. “What I don’t think you see is evidence of people who live in and around that neighborhood benefiting from the employment opportunities.”

The effort is still in its early days, less than two years old, so far helping about 100 individuals find work. That number will triple, organizers hope, over the next two years, maybe even more if they can raise more support from the private sector and the city.

The effort has two elements. The first is to identify individuals who are looking for work and prepare them.

“In many ways it’s like an old-fashioned employment agency,” said Jockers. “You come in and meet with the job guy. You talk about what your skills are and what you’re interested in.”

This personal touch is important, and not something to lose as the program grows, Jockers says. “Our intention is to be a person-by-person deeper dive,” he said.

Equally important is the effort to identify available jobs.

“The big names have shown real interest. Google and its various components. Pfizer. Amazon,” Jockers explained. “Some of the biggest companies in the world that happen to have a presence right here.”

But cracking the hiring process of global companies is no small task.

“Pfizer brought in their HR folks and said, ‘Let’s talk about this.’ So what does that mean to hire locally when you’re a major multinational corporation? How do you do that in your home neighborhood? What are the needs right here in the neighborhood and how do they get filled?”

One opportunity has been with the subcontractors who clean and service the offices of these major companies.

“What do you do when you subcontract out building services?” Jockers said, reliving the conversation with potential employers. “Okay, then can you introduce us to your service providers and try to facilitate a relationship there? A couple of companies that’s what they’ve done. Let’s introduce you to X firm that does our food service or our critical building functions that are right here in the neighborhood. Which we are really pleased with as a start.”

NYU, Northwell, and the local Business Improvement Districts have also been important sources of job opportunities.

Food service is the path Brandon Jaramillo found through the West Side workforce initiative. He is a 21-year-old high school graduate for whom college did not seem a next step. He tried delivery services but could find only seasonal work.

A friend sent him to a workshop at Hudson Guild to improve his résume, part of the workforce development. That led to an internship in the kitchen of Hudson Guild’s own Older Adult Center.

He did so “really, really well,” according to Armisha Scott, director of the Adult Center, that now he’s a full-time kitchen aide. “Brandon, he did so well, we wanted him. A position opened up and what he did was he applied. He followed all the steps.”

“Before I joined Hudson Guild I was mostly just unemployed,” Jaramillo recalled. “I was mostly just job hunting a lot and then I ended up here.”

He has learned both culinary skills and people skills. Now he even thinks about further education, culinary school perhaps.

“He’s definitely serious about his career,” raves Scott. “We talk about job development still. He’s 21, and we know this may not be his forever home. But while he’s here at least he’s getting a strong foundation for his next step in life.”

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