Last Thursday’s announcement of the Finger Lakes Region’s win in the Upstate Revitalization Initiative (URI) was welcome and exciting news. The Finger Lakes region was one of only three $500M recipients across the state. Much more than a fantastic way to kick off the holiday season, the five years of URI funding will make our new year brighter and more hopeful.
MCC has been at the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council (FLREDC) leadership table since Governor Cuomo began the councils. Our faculty and staff have also played significant roles on FLREDC work groups. In the URI plan, MCC was most actively engaged in designing the “Pathways to Prosperity” framework that linked the efforts of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative to workforce development. Our region embraced the three goals provided by the Governor for all URI plans—grow jobs, leverage private investment, and increase regional wealth—and added a fourth: reduce poverty. With these four goals, the FLREDC plan, “United for Success,” focused on assuring that the rising tide of economic opportunity promised by the URI funding would lift all members of our community.
Each winning region now awaits guidance from the state on the application process for individual projects. However, our URI proposal did include several projects that the FLREDC identified as being both ready to start on day one and consonant with the region’s goals.
Significantly, one of those projects was proposed by MCC: the Finger Lakes Workforce Development Center (FWD Center). The FWD Center is planned as a multi-use, flexible workforce training center at Eastman Business Park designed to focus on short term, credit and non-credit training serving the businesses in EBP and beyond. The center would move low-income individuals quickly through training directly connected with jobs in the park and region, partnering with business, industry, and community organizations to support the students with internships, social services, and placement. The FWD Center would allow the College to capture enrollments from residents who currently bypass MCC for other options with limited success (such as for-profit education) or who never access higher education at all. We are excited to have the chance to seek URI funding for this impactful project.
Last week, the Governor also announced the annual awards to the FLREDC. MCC was awarded $57,000, for the Applied Technologies Center to renovate Automotive Technology space. This grant will support the extensive curriculum redesign undertaken by program faculty. It will match existing funds to build out the space needed at the ATC to meet the recently revised requirements for the Toyota T-Ten certification and provide a general Auto Tech lab. Interestingly, much of the anticipated growth in enrollment for this program will come from incumbent workers seeking to obtain new skill sets and advance their careers—another sign of the ways MCC and our faculty respond to ongoing changes in industry.
It has been an honor to be a part of the FLREDC from the beginning and to see our region be recognized for our vision, plan, hard work, and dedicated efforts. MCC's seat at the table has never been more valuable nor more important than it is now, as our region continues to look to our College as the leader in high quality, responsive workforce education. Our thanks to Governor Cuomo for his leadership on behalf of Upstate and for his support of pathways to prosperity in our community.
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