By GREGORY ZELLER //
Long Island’s newest university and a Farmingdale-based coffeemaker with a heart of gold are teaming up to promote regional workforce development.
A $2 million donation from S. Zaki Hossain, president of Farmingdale-based Pintail Coffee and a member of the Molloy University Board of Trustees, will support Molloy’s new Workforce Development Program. The gift, announced Tuesday at an event celebrating Molloy’s new university status, will help found the Rockville Centre institution’s new Workforce Development Program, projected to provide training across a variety of industries – with an emphasis on Long Island’s busy healthcare-related fields.
Hossain, a Bangladesh-born mechanical engineer who earned a master’s degree in engineering at Brooklyn’s Polytechnic Institute (now the New York University Tandon School of Engineering) and co-founded Deer Park-based Modern Packaging, has built a career around innovation and philanthropy.
James Lentini: Expanding Molloy’s lead.
Launched in 1989, Modern Packaging is a leading provider of cup- and tray-filling mechanical solutions for the food, beverage and dairy industries, leveraging Hossain’s early successes as a manufacturer of coffee-machine “K-cups.”
Today, among other pay-it-forward efforts, the successful entrepreneur is a member of the Island Harvest Food Bank Board of Trustees and a board member of the Energeia Partnership, a Molloy University-managed regional stewardship group uniting diverse leaders from the public, private and nonprofit sectors on a mission to confront complex issues in education, energy, social justice and other critical areas.
That kind of altruistic thinking drives Pintail Coffee’s unique business model: Officially incorporated in 2013, the Farmingdale manufacturer/distributor – which produces top-quality Arabica coffee as whole beans, bagged pre-ground beans and single-serve cups – donates 100 percent of its profits to worldwide hunger and food-insecurity programs.
It also explains Hossain’s latest Molloy University gift, which the trustee – who previously donated $500,000 to help establish multiple scholarship programs at then-Molloy College – credited to “the university’s focus on serving its communities.”
“My hope for this gift is to further enhance the (university’s) commitment to workforce development, specifically in the healthcare industry, where Molloy has earned an extremely strong reputation over the years,” Hossain added.
Edward Thompson, Molloy’s vice president for advancement, praised the benefactor’s generosity, “both financially and for his time and talent,” while university President James Lentini said the standout engineer’s seven-digit donation would go a long way toward strengthening Molloy’s across-the-board workforce-development efforts.
“We plan to expand our regional and national leadership in educating healthcare professionals,” Lentini said in a statement, “in addition to broadening high-demand academic programming in our schools of business, education and human services, arts and sciences, and nursing and health sciences.”
