NYIRN Manufactures a New Home
Posted on 15. Oct, 2010 by Lisa Riordan Seville in Uncategorized
After years in Manhattan, the New York Industrial Retention Network (NYIRN) is taking a page from many of its manufacturing clients. It’s moving to Brooklyn.
NYIRN, one of the city’s largest manufacturing advocates, will soon become part of the Pratt Center for Community Development, the urban planning center at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute.
The merger of the two organizations follows the trend in recent years of advocating sustainable practices in manufacturing and supporting the high-value artisan that parallels how economic changes have shaped the manufacturing sector in the city over the past three decades. It is also an effort to keep NYIRN afloat.
“The thing you got to keep asking yourself is how are you furthering your mission?” says Adam Friedman was the founding director of NYRIN in 1997. He occupied that position until the middle of last year when he left to become the director of the Pratt Center.
According to Friedman, non-profit organizations have two missions. In NYIRN’s case, the first was to offer services that would help keep manufacturers in New York City.
“The second one is just to stay alive,” Friedman says.
Financial records indicate resources were dwindling at NYIRN. In an annual report released in January 2010 the organization noted, “NYIRN’s business assistance numbers have been affected by the recession and harsh economic climate facing businesses since summer 2007 and especially since the fall of 2008.” The organization had seen a marked decline in demand for consulting services, its bread and butter, starting as early as 2007.
Shrinking companies had few resources to spend on consulting, so NYIRN felt the ripple effects. Tax records show contract service income dropped significantly between fiscal years 2007 and 2008, from $931,707 to just $699,446 a year later.
This reflects impact of the recent recession on New York City manufacturers. The employment pool dropped nearly 15 percent. Since the economy’s peak in December 2007, according to August report from real estate company Eastern Consolidated. This has persisted even into the nation’s slow economic recovery.
“The rest of the country saw a strong manufacturing growth and we did not participate in that at all,” says Barbara Denham, TK at Eastern Consolidated. “That’s definitely one way that we’re defying the national trend.”
Most industries in New York City have weathered the recession remarkably well. Manufacturing is the exception. Numbers continued to slip even into August 2010, offering little sign that the city would regain the approximately 20,000 manufacturing jobs lost since August 2007.
This is not to say that NYIRN was not successful in connecting manufacturing with resources. NYIRN had in recent years received two significant grants to help small businesses become more energy efficient. One, funded by New York’s City Council, helped 27 businesses before exhausting its funds, according to a report 2010 by the Center for an Urban Future. A second funded by the U.S. Department of Energy helped 12 businesses before tapping out. Then the recession hit, and money for such programs dried up.
NYIRN began to look towards partnering with other organizations. After considering several, Pratt seemed the best fit. The Pratt Center brings intellectual resources at the university like industrial design, facilities management and environmental design. NYIRN brings connections to industry.
“The consolidation also presents an approach to community development and urban planning that seeks to integrate the resources that communities will need as we move into the next century,” says Gary Hattem, chair of the Pratt Center’s Advisory Board, in a statement announcing the merger this September.
Though NYIRN will continue some of its traditional work on supporting food producers and green industry, it may also hone in on new sectors—like diamonds.
“We are about to launch a study of the diamond and jewelry industry,” said Pratt Center Director Adam Friedman . “That’s an industrial sector study that NYRIN would be positioned to do.” The study may use resources like Pratt’s jewelry design program, and the Center’s study may then inform the way Pratt designs is curriculum.
That’s a significant change from mid-century manufacturing, where tin can factories and t-shirt producers offered workers with little educational background or training stable jobs, good wages and benefits.
Manufacturing will not provide the foundation for jobs in this century that it did in the last. But niche businesses and green production still has a place in New York City, Friedman says.
Manufacturing has shifted from the foundation of employment in New York to become a piece of a larger economic strategy.
“I don’t think your going to have a big volume of jobs again,” Friedman says, “but for some group of people, manufacturing is a great chance to have a middle class job.”
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