By GREGORY ZELLER //
A driving force against regional food insecurity is changing the way food banks operate, by addressing hunger’s root causes.
In this case, unemployment, underemployment and the lack of professional skills – a traumatic trifecta directly contributing to food insecurity on Long Island and beyond, and squarely in the sights of the new Workforce Skills Development Institute created by Island Harvest Food Bank and a host of program partners including Amazon, Ikea USA and the Stop & Shop Supermarket Co., among others.
After welcoming its inaugural student cohort in January, the institute held its first-ever graduation ceremony this week at Melville’s Hilton Long Island, fêting 10 ready workers newly certified in Warehousing and Inventory Control.
The graduates – the first of what Island Harvest projects will be upwards of 135 annually, addressing various sector-specific skillsets – completed an intensive, weeks-long training gauntlet filled with technical and nontechnical skill-sharpening.
Randi Shubin Dresner: One insecurity at a time.
Basic Workforce Skills Development Institute programming covers “employability training” (everything from résumé writing to interviewing skills), while the first cohort boned up on warehousing and inventory-control technical skills demanded by regional employers.
Island Harvest is recruiting students through the New York State Department of Labor, Nassau and Suffolk career centers, regional BOCES and fellow food banks, among other sources likely to produce candidates in need of Island Harvest’s primary services.
Training the food-insecure to earn a wage and provide for themselves is a more sustainable, long-term solution than simply handing them a bag of food – and the best proactive approach against an “overarching, chronic issue” like national food insecurity, according to Island Harvest Food Bank President and CEO Randi Shubin Dresner.
“Providing supplemental food support and related services to people who are food insecure is important,” Dresner noted. “However, it is a short-term solution.
“Our Workforce Skills Development Institute addresses one of the root causes of food insecurity,” she added. “If we could solve the problem of income insecurity, we could get close to solving food insecurity.”
Packing it in: Give someone a box of food, they’ll eat for a week. Teach them warehousing and inventory-control skills…
The Workforce Skills Development Institute also offers participants “wrap-around services” including transportation and childcare stipends, plus career coaching and other support during and after the program – further incentives to completing the program and increasing their workplace worth.
And it directly addresses the concerns of regional employers. Island Harvest worked with Long Island business leaders to develop the institute’s content strategy, ensuring a mixture of soft skills – leadership, time-management and communication skills, for instance – and the exact technical acumen needed most.
The result is a first-of-its-kind workforce initiative for Long Island, and a blueprint for how food insecurity might be addressed in other national corners, according to Island Harvest Chief Workforce Institute Officer Maria Arianas.
“The Workforce Skills Development Institute matches the needs of local businesses … with those of workers who are underemployed or unemployed (and) seeking to enter, re-enter or move up in the workforce,” Arianas said in a statement. “Existing workforce programs do not often provide the collaboration, coordination and future-skill focus to tackle the challenges they may face in the workforce.”
