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Peter Pan Rolls into Its Fourth Generation

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Melissa and Peter A. Picknelly (far left and right) with fourth-generation company leaders
Cover Story Features

Staying True to Their Routes

 

Melissa and Peter A. Picknelly (far left and right) with fourth-generation company leaders

Melissa and Peter A. Picknelly (far left and right) with fourth-generation company leaders Lauryn Picknelly-DuBois, Alyssa Picknelly-Dube, and Peter B. Picknelly. (Staff Photo)

The past five years have brought a raft of challeges to the world of tourism and transportation.

The biggest one? Survival.

“The worldwide pandemic was tough on our industry, and many other industries,” Peter A. Picknelly, chairman and CEO of Peter Pan Bus Lines, told BusinessWest. “For three years, we had the government using our tax dollars to tell people not to use our service.”

There’s a bit of edge in his voice as he brings up topics like shutting down travel, and then restrictions like social distancing that accompanied its gradual return.

“But we survived, and we’re thriving now. We’ve invested $25 million in new equipment in the last couple of years. We’re modernizing our fleet, which is what our consumer wants; they want a nice, clean, modern bus. And we’re continuing to expand our route structure,” he said, noting that Peter Pan serves about 100 locations in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

“We listen to our customers — where they want to go — and we expand where it makes sense. We recently expanded to Newark, New Jersey, and a suburb right outside of Baltimore called White Marsh. And we’ve added service on Cape Cod. We’re always looking at new areas.”

But the company is also looking to the future in other ways, most notably some emerging leadership from the fourth generation of this family business launched by Picknelly’s grandfather in 1933.

“You just don’t see workers commuting to work, and if they do, they’re not working Mondays and Fridays. I mean, the full-time office worker is just not rebounding. It’s better than it was, and it will eventually come back, I think, but some businesses are just going to thrive on people that work remotely.”

“I kind of grew up just learning from him and wanting to work here,” said Peter B. Picknelly, one of three children of Peter A. and Melissa Picknelly (the company’s vice president) now working at Peter Pan. A fourth is still in college and mulling career goals.

“I had no doubt in my mind that this is what I wanted to do,” added the younger Peter, who is the company’s director of Safety & Security. “I grew up going to school and trying to better myself so I could then come into the business. That’s what I always wanted to do.”

That’s a story his father can relate to. “I’m the third generation; Peter and his sisters are the fourth,” he said. “But I never forced them into it. When I grew up, some kids wanted to be baseball players or football players. All I wanted to do was follow my father and grandfather. And I can’t tell you how proud I am that our kids chose to do that — but it was their decision.”

Peter A. Picknelly

Peter A. Picknelly, standing before some portraits of his predecessors, says there are very few family-owned bus companies in the U.S. today.
Staff Photo

Other fourth-generation leaders at Peter Pan include Lauryn Picknelly-DuBois, who was promoted two years ago to controller, and Alyssa Picknelly-Dube, who is involved with the Maintenance division. (A fourth child is still in college and mulling career goals.)

“There are very few family-operated bus companies in the United States anymore,” their father said. “Here, the fourth generation is already set, and they’re still in their 20s. I think it assures our employees and our customers that we will be around for a long time. They are doing an amazing job.”

 

All Aboard

They’re doing it at a time when public-transportation demographics might be changing, but bus travel clearly remains important.

Peter Pan specializes in travel that’s longer than a typical work commute, but within 200 miles — a distance that can be covered as quickly as flying, once the airport time is factored in, the senior Picknelly explained.

These days, most travelers are between 18 and 35 years old or over 50, he added. “They may have an automobile, but the bus is more affordable. We go city center to city center. And parking can be extremely expensive in some areas, and hard to find.”

He added that the pandemic hit the work-commuter customer base hard, and it’s still struggling, at around 60% of pre-pandemic volume.

“You just don’t see workers commuting to work, and if they do, they’re not working Mondays and Fridays. I mean, the full-time office worker is just not rebounding. It’s better than it was, and it will eventually come back, I think, but some businesses are just going to thrive on people that work remotely.”

That said, the longer-distance service — say, Boston to New York or New York to Philadelphia — is booming, especially as gas prices have remained high and cities have gone to congestion pricing.

And gas prices do make a difference, he added. “You can instantly see it when gas prices go up. Our cost of operation goes up when fuel goes up — it’s our third-largest cost. But it’s outweighed by the fact that more people seek an alternative. When fuel hits $3, $4 a gallon, you can see an instant surge.”

That said, today’s buses are much more fuel-efficient, Picknelly said, and feature an anti-idling function that shuts them off when they idle at a gate or while parked for more than five minutes (but not while in traffic).

“There are situations when the idling won’t turn off — say it’s middle of winter and it’s freezing, and you want to heat up a little bit. That will override the five-minute idle shutdown,” Peter B. Picknelly said. “Same thing if it’s too hot — to keep the bus cool, it’ll override it.”

Other features of a modern bus include better-designed seats, video and Wi-Fi, and cameras that capture a 360-degree view of the bus for safety purposes.

Peter B. Picknelly

Peter B. Picknelly, director of Safety & Security, is one of three fourth-generation family members so far to have chosen Peter Pan as a career.
Staff Photo

As for those who drive the buses — the current fleet is about 200 vehicles — the younger Picknelly said the workforce crunch was severe a couple of years ago, but hiring has picked up considerably since. “We get a lot of applications every single day, so we’re able to be a little bit more picky when it comes to the driver force.”

His father noted that hiring is easier in some areas than in others. “We’re constantly hiring. But while Cape Cod and Boston are difficult locations, with our driver forces in New York and D.C., we have plenty of applications.”

Peter Pan has been receiving more applications these days from younger people, and the company has brought on employees in the process of getting their commercial driver’s license, and even reimbursed them for it.

“It’s a very good job if you like to drive and you want to deal with people,” Picknelly said. “Our drivers choose what routes they want to operate and when they want to work. Our position is, if you like doing what you want to do, you’re going to do a better job.

“But you’ve got to like to drive, and you’ve got to like to deal with people,” he added. “We can train just about anybody to drive a bus. But you can’t train someone to have good customer-service skills. And wanting to drive is just something you’ve got to have a passion for. Because that’s what we do.”

The younger Picknelly agreed. “It’s good getting these young people on board because most of the time they’re pretty loyal, and they want to stick with the company for a long time. We have people who have been here for so long because they came on when they were younger and were extremely loyal to the company, and that’s what we’re hoping to get now.”

 

Shifting Gears

Looking to the future, Peter Pan continues to find more ways to be the transportation mode of choice for its customers, especially younger riders, and that means making their travel plans easier.

To that end, the company recently announced a new strategic partnership with Trailways, extending its network of destinations, as well as a strategic alliance with Amtrak.

“So you can take a train somewhere, and then they’ll connect to a bus, and we can take you right to the city center,” Peter A. Picknelly said, and from there, rideshares can take over. “We’re also forming alliances with Ubers and Lyfts where you can coordinate being picked up wherever we drop you off, and instantly getting in an Uber and taking it to your final destination. Because of this coordination, more and more people are saying they don’t need to drive, particularly young people that live in the big city.”

“We can train just about anybody to drive a bus. But you can’t train someone to have good customer-service skills. And wanting to drive is just something you’ve got to have a passion for.”

Statistics bear that trend out. Last year, driver’s license applications actually went down, reversing a 50-year upward trend, he noted.

“It’s so convenient. If you go to Europe, taking public transportation is always involved, and you’re seeing more of that here. It’s way more convenient, and with the amenities in the vehicle, you can work or entertain yourself while you’re traveling. You can’t do that when you’re driving.”

Peter Pan also maintains a model of managing terminals — another one of Peter B. Picknelly’s roles — in its destination cities, with amenities like food, restrooms, a service counter, and a pickup area, instead of the model of picking up and dropping off on unattended corners.

“We don’t like picking up on a street corner like some of these other bus companies,” Peter B. added. “We like going into a terminal or a specific designated area, so they can have that one-on-one personal experience with our employees if they have an issue or have any questions or concerns. We’re a customer-driven business, so we like pleasing the customers.”

About 15% of Peter Pan’s business, meanwhile, is charter service to destinations not on the regular route plan.

“Charters are very big, and in the summer, it picks up a lot. There are people who go out to Saratoga Race Course on the weekend; that’s a very popular place. We’ll take them wherever.”

One shift that occurred over the pandemic years has been a move toward online booking, his father added.

“Prior to COVID, about 50% of our riders would buy their ticket a half-hour before departure, in person. Now, 90% of our sales now are in advance. Most people are booking within three days of their trip, online.”

But, as mentioned up top, the biggest story of the pandemic for Peter Pan was … well, simply surviving it, and coming out stronger on the other side, with plans for the future and a band of 20-something Picknellys ready to evolve into stronger leadership roles.

“We’re really proud of all of our staff,” their father said. “Listen, 40% of all bus companies didn’t make it through the pandemic. We did, and we’re thriving. We’ve had to change our focus on longer-distance trips, less commuter-related, more group travel, but we’re doing well.”

Peter B. Picknelly agreed. “In hindsight, COVID was horrible, but it made us think about how we could run things differently here, and it’s been beneficial.”

V-One Owner Charts Aggressive Course of Expansion, Growth

By
Paul Kozub says the need to keep the distillery in Poland busy
Features Special Coverage

At a Tipping Point

Paul Kozub with his children

Paul Kozub with his children, from left, Weston, Ela, Augustin, and Vincent, at the distillery in Kamien, Poland, that he acquired in 2019.

When asked about all that has changed since he first started finalizing plans for creating his own vodka label 20 years ago, Paul Kozub chose to start with the personal side of his life.

“Back then, I was a single guy living alone with not many cares in the world; now, I’m married with four kids under the age of 10,” he said, adding that this reality explains why he only visits the distillery he owns in Poland maybe once a year instead of three or four times, as he did earlier, and why he presides over maybe 20 in-store tastings a year instead of the 50 or 60 he was averaging a few years ago.

As for the business side of the equation, there have been equally significant changes. He started with one flavor in one region of the Bay State, the 413. Now, there are 10 flavors, including a lemon that changes colors and a hugely popular double espresso. And they are now available in eight states — the six New England states as well as New Jersey and Texas — although they can be shipped almost anywhere, as we’ll see.

And there’s that distillery in Poland, which Kozub now owns a 51% share in. He made that investment in 2019 in a critical step that saw him move from outsourcing production to overseeing (officially if not literally) every step in the process.

And while there have been huge leaps in overall growth — from 700 to 1,000 cases produced and sold per year early on to more than 20,000 today — there have been myriad challenges as well, everything from a global pandemic to the war in Ukraine (the distillery is only a few miles from the border); from huge swings in the cost of getting containers from Poland to the U.S. ($4,200 per shipment to $16,000 back down to $4,200) to the burgeoning cannabis industry (in states where cannabis is legalized, there is an accompanying decline in alcohol sales, Kozub reported).

But while looking back — and then ahead — Kozub chose to focus mostly on what hasn’t changed. The goal, then and now, has been to become a national and then international vodka label, and in some respects, that’s already been accomplished; he does sell some vodka in Poland, but not much, as V-One’s prices are higher than other brands because of how it’s made.

And while the original goal was to make a living selling vodka, something he could do when he was selling 1,000 cases a year, the overriding ambition has been to continually grow the label by taking it to more markets in more states and, eventually, more countries.

While that hasn’t changed either, this desire to grow has morphed into a critical need — because of that distillery and the importance of keeping it busy.

Kozub summed it all up directly, and poignantly.

“For me, V-One is at a crucial tipping point,” he explained. “We’re either going to stay small — a Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island business — or we’re going to get bigger, and a lot bigger, as a national brand or even an international brand.

“For me, V-One is at a crucial tipping point. We’re either going to stay small — a Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island business — or we’re going to get bigger, and a lot bigger, as a national brand or even an international brand.”

“And the decision has kind of been made for me because of the distillery purchase — the capacity that facility has and the need to keep it busy on a daily basis, which it is not right now,” he went on, adding that, with this decision — and a subsequent capital raise involving local investors — Kozub is moving forward aggressively with plans to more than double his current sales force and move into more states, starting with Florida, then New York, then other states on the East Coast.

It’s an intriguing next chapter in a story that has featured a number of plot twists and turns but a continued focus on the proverbial big picture and how to make it become reality.

V-One now boasts 10 flavors

V-One now boasts 10 flavors, and Paul Kozub hints that more additions to the lineup may be coming soon.
(Photo courtesy of Chris Marion)

For this issue, BusinessWest talked at length with Kozub about the latest, quite significant adjustments to the V-One business plan and how they provide more proof — yes, that’s an industry term — of how those original plans haven’t exactly changed. They’ve just been supersized.

 

Proof Positive

By now, most people around here know at least the basics of the V-One story.

With a small, $6,000 inheritance from an uncle and some entrepreneurial vigor that ran in the family (his father started Janlynn Corp.), Kozub put aside a career in banking — he was a commercial lender with TD Bank — to fulfill a long-held dream to launch his own vodka label.

That was in 2005. He started with a small still in his basement and soon made his way to Poland to meet with a world-renowned vodka expert for advice, but also inspiration. He made the critical decision to become the first producer of vodka made exclusively from organic spelt wheat (most other vodkas are made from corn).

Over the next 19 years, V-One has grown and evolved, adding new flavors, winning several awards, expanding its reach across New England and beyond, and increasing the number of cases sold each year. Along the way, there have been several milestones — from the opening of V-One’s world headquarters in the former St. John’s Church on Route 9 in Hadley to a rebranding that saw a new look to the bottles, to the acquisition and subsequent expansion of the distillery in Kamien, Poland, a multi-million-dollar investment fueled by a desire to take more control of the process.

“I’ll make this analogy … instead of buying milk from the store, we now own the cow. We need to keep the distillery busier, and we need to essentially double the business that we’re doing now.”

BusinessWest has chronicled the story, and along the way, Kozub has earned two of the magazine’s awards — inclusion in the inaugural 40 Under Forty class of 2007, then being named the magazine’s Top Entrepreneur for 2016.

As he noted at the top, he now has four young children — “life has gotten a little more complicated” — so that means fewer trips to Poland, although he was recently there for some end-of-fiscal-year matters, and more Zoom calls with his master distiller there.

“He has things handled pretty well as far as production goes, so I don’t need to go as much as I used to,” Kozub said, noting, again, that the critical to keep that distillery busy — at optimum output, the facility could increase production 10-fold — has prompted the latest adjustments to the business plan, capital raise, and plans to aggressively move into other states.

Paul Kozub says the need to keep the distillery in Poland busy

Paul Kozub says the need to keep the distillery in Poland busy — busier than it is now — is fueling the company’s aggressive plans for continued growth.

“Before, it was a case of wanting to grow; now, it’s kind of like we have to grow,” he told BusinessWest. “I’ll make this analogy … instead of buying milk from the store, we now own the cow. We need to keep the distillery busier, and we need to essentially double the business that we’re doing now.”

Elaborating, he said he has no real desire to produce other vodka labels in Kamien, only V-One. Which means producing more of it.

“And to do that, we need to put more people, more salespeople, on the street, and tell the V-One story,” he said, adding that this need to hire and ratchet up marketing efforts — although the company still relies heavily on social media — was the impetus for the recent capital raise.

“My next goal is to get V-One in at least five more states in the next 12 to 24 months,” he said, adding that Florida will be the next target.

 

Entrepreneurial Spirit

The Sunshine State should be a natural next step, Kozub went on, noting that, while consumption of vodka in Poland is higher during the colder months of the year — primarily because people there drink it straight — in the U.S., vodka is generally mixed with other ingredients that are put over ice, making it a warmer-weather choice.

“A place like Florida has great, year-round weather for vodka drinking,” he said. “And there’s obviously a lot of vacationing, a lot of people by the pool. You really don’t want to drink heavy drinks when you’re by the pool; you want lighter drinks like a vodka soda or mojito.”

As he noted earlier, entering new states and new markets is difficult — and expensive. With immense competition in the vodka aisle, there is a strong need to build brand awareness and gain a foothold. And this requires boots on the ground, he said, adding that, while V-One works with distributors, those large companies represent literally thousands of different labels.

“You have distributors in each market, but you also want to have someone talking to those bars and restaurants and liquor stores,” he told BusinessWest. “You need to have someone else telling the story because these distributors are selling 3,000, 4,000, maybe 5,000 other items, and they’re pushing the big brands, so the smaller brands just get left by the wayside.

“So you have to put someone in each market to tell your story,” he went on, adding that he is looking to bring on several additional salespeople in the coming months to do this storytelling.

While Florida is the next primary target, the goal, as he mentioned, is to be in a handful of other states within the next year or two.

New York is another primary target, he said, adding that the plan after making some headway in that all-important state is to move down the East Coast, perhaps into Virginia, Delaware, and North and South Carolina.

“We want to keep things on this side of the country for now,” he said, adding that the ability to ship products to different states (35 of them at present) enables V-One to expand its presence in that fashion. It’s a small but nonetheless meaningful arrow in the quiver, but one that is growing steadily and has potential to continue the growth trajectory.

Overall, expansion into a new state comes with a price tag of $100,000 to $250,000 for marketing, additional salespeople, and other expenses, he said, adding that this is just part of the cost of doing business.

And it’s a critical aspect of being at this important tipping point for V-One, as Kozub called it. As he noted, the company has progressed from wanting to grow to needing to grow.

“For me, it’s time to take that next big step,” he said, adding that he’s approaching this next phase for his company the way he has all those that have come before it — with a focus on that original dream of creating a vodka label and then taking it around the world.

Firms Say New Talent Drawn by Mission, Culture, Opportunity

By
Ashley Sullivan, president of O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun.
Environment and Engineering Special Coverage

Engineering a Youth Movement

Ashley Sullivan, president of O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun.

Ashley Sullivan, president of O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun.

 

Ashley Sullivan can think of plenty of reasons why someone might want to go into engineering.

“It is a very rewarding field where you get to see your work benefit your family and your community,” the president and CEO of Springfield-based O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun said. “And you’re always going to need civil engineers, so there’s job protection there. There’s so much opportunity in the field, whether you want to go into construction or consulting or the regulatory side. There’s a lot of different options, and each individual can find what’s right for them.”

That said, the industry is facing the same headwinds seen in other fields these days, ranging from construction to manufacturing to insurance: retirements outpacing the number of young people coming on board.

“We’ve had a lot of retirements; as quick as I hire, we have people retire or leave the industry,” Sullivan said. “We’re trying to grow, we’re trying to hire, and we make progress one year, and then a few months later, we might fall back. We’re trying to hire about five more by the end of the year, but, just like with everybody else, it’s been very challenging.

“Previously, being a smaller, local firm, we didn’t necessarily compete with the larger firms or state agencies because if somebody liked a small firm, they liked a small firm, versus a larger firm. Now we’re finding we’re going up against those agencies and larger firms,” she went on. “I’m not sure if that’s because of the hybrid or remote potential. We’ve really focused on the ones that want to work near where they live, but now it’s getting hard to do that. There are also a lot of competitive salaries out there, so we’ve had to adjust to that. It’s definitely a challenge.”

Westfield-based Tighe & Bond is at the other end of the hiring spectrum, boasting about 600 employees at 17 locations across the Northeast. The firm is growing significantly at a time when a surge of federal funding — from the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 to the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act of 2022 — is creating plenty of opportunity for civil-engineering firms.

“They’re requiring technical talent throughout the country to do all the work that’s coming,” President and CEO Bob Belitz said, noting that the firm has more employees dedicated to recruiting and onboarding than in the past. “We’ve made an investment in that function because it’s such a big part of our business.”

He added that the firm’s broad footprint across the Northeast makes it easier to recruit and retain talent. “Before, if somebody was working for us and got married and moved to New Hampshire, Maine, or New York, they might have to leave us to go work for somebody else because we didn’t have offices there. Now we do. From a growth perspective, it helps to be able to transfer you among other offices.”

Bob Belitz

Bob Belitz says work opportunities for engineering firms are high right now, and so is the need to attract new talent.
Staff Photo

But with some turnover to be expected in a company this size, and with a goal of growing both organically and through acquisitions, Tighe & Bond needs to onboard more than 100 new employees each year, and doing so successfully requires it to stand out from its competitors in a number of ways, Belitz said, from its employee-ownership model to hybrid work schedules; from a strong benefits program to a broad mix of projects.

Sullivan said communicating the culture of a company to job seekers is also critical.

“When we’ve had conversations where we effectively communicate that, people are very interested in working here,” she said, adding that another factor is communicating a clear path to career advancement.

“One of the things I think is so great about engineering — particularly about civil engineering or the environmental engineering that we do — is that we make our community better.”

“I am looking for future business partners. You’re working with the people that are managing the business, you’re getting day-to-day experience in that, and there’s real, clear potential for somebody to be a stockholder, be on the board of directors, and guide the company sooner than they might at a larger company. We can give examples of that. So that’s something that we try to explain. We feel that, if we’re effective in communicating that, we’ll find the right people.”

 

Mission Driven

As a civil engineer teaching at a women’s liberal-arts college, Glenn Ellis, a professor of Engineering at Smith College, said his students often come to the field from a specific mindset — namely, social impact.

“The number-one thing I hear from students is they want to do some good for the world, to make the world a better place,” he told BusinessWest. “They’re very interested in sustainability. That’s the number-one draw for many students as an engineer. And you can really make an impact on all sorts of things.”

That line of thinking resonates with Sullivan. “One of the things I think is so great about engineering — particularly about civil engineering or the environmental engineering that we do — is that we make our community better,” she said. “We’re an important part of that, and you can see it.”

Ellis noted that the industry code of ethics now includes sustainability as a key tenet, which dovetails with what his students are demanding. But he also said young people are drawn to the sheer diversity of engineering and how broadly it impacts the world.

“The more young people know what an engineer is, the more they’re interested in it. Studies show that the reason why way fewer women than men are engineers is not because women leave these programs at a higher rate than men; they leave at the same rate. It’s that they don’t go into engineering programs to begin with.”

And the time to start capturing their interest, he added — not just for engineering but for all STEM fields, where women have been historically underrepresented — is not college or even high school, but middle school.

“I say to a lot of young people, ‘you know, everything you can see has been designed by engineers. Engineers literally designed the entire world.’”

“I think that’s the time to develop a STEM identity. When you ask kids in middle school if they want to be engineers, they say, ‘I don’t know what that is,’ or ‘that’s really boring; you just work on pipes and buildings.’”

Ellis spoke with one young girl who said she wasn’t interested in engineering, but she wanted to work in the medical realm, helping to design artificial limbs that will help people.

“I said, ‘that’s engineering — that’s bioengineering.’ Young people don’t know what engineering is, so you need to introduce them at a young age, show them that it’s not just building bridges and wearing hardhats. This is a creative profession, a collaborative profession. If you want to change the world, this is the place to do it.”

And employers know talented young engineers have options in choosing where to make their mark, so recruitment, onboarding, and benefits are all critical.

“When we think about our benefit programs, we need to think about things that are important to the younger generations,” Belitz noted, and these run the gamut at Tighe & Bond from student-loan assistance to wellness programs to pet insurance, but also include a strong focus on mentorship, learning, and professional-development opportunities, including the addition of a female mentoring program last year.

“We’re also always giving back to our communities, and we try to talk about that as much as we can when we’re recruiting people,” he went on. “Hopefully that total package, along with the work that we have in the backlog, is attractive to the younger and mid-career people, who are the hardest ones to retain.”

O’Reilly, Talbot & Okun, while a much smaller firm, is also in a growth mode.

“There is a lot of work to be done, and the clients need us to get their work done,” Sullivan said, adding that the industry is facing a bit of an experience gap as veterans retire and young engineers replace them.

“We knew this was coming, so you have to invest in your people and make sure that you’re narrowing that gap continuously,” she told BusinessWest. “One of the things that we’ve done — and that I continue to do — is really invest back in people, try to give them the skills and get them the training.

“And not just the technical training, but also business development, project management, and entrepreneurial skills that get you even further,” she went on. “That’s something that I knew I had to do five years ago, and I’ve continued to do that. We just finished a big team training about presentation skills, whether in a small meeting or a large group, but it was also about team building, communication, and all that.”

 

Making a Difference

Ellis said Smith has been graduating a few dozen engineers each year, and they’re entering a market that’s tilted somewhat to job seekers.

Conversely, for employers, “it’s very challenging,” Sullivan said. “It’s just really hard to find people right now. We’ve had some people with a verbal acceptance, and then a few weeks later, they get a counteroffer and stay where they are.”

Meanwhile, Ellis hopes more young people — particularly young women — get the message early on that this is a meaningful, impactful career with plenty of opportunity.

“Women are definitely more attracted to engineering when they can be involved in messy, complex societal issues, which actually is what engineering is all about. It’s all about taking math and science and solving problems for society,” he said.

“I say to a lot of young people, ‘you know, everything you can see has been designed by engineers. Engineers literally designed the entire world. You can go into it and move up in the world and make a difference.’”

DEI Strategies in the Workplace Take Many Forms

By
Special Coverage Workforce Development

Culture Shift

Nicole Polite, CEO of the MH Group. (Staff Photo)

 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion — commonly known as DEI — has become a well-recognized expression in the world of employment, human resources, and executive suites.

But Nicole Polite prefers the term DEIB, which incorporates the word belonging, and there’s a reason for that.

“The belonging factor is making sure that your employees feel like they’re part of a community or environment where they all feel connected, regardless of race, color, creed, and everything else,” said Polite, CEO of the MH Group, which provides a range of staffing services to client employers. “I’m glad belonging is being emphasized; I believe that’s a key factor. Because if you don’t feel like you belong somewhere, then it’s not a good space for you.”

While the term DEI has become politicized in some corners, Polite doesn’t see the concepts behind it fading in importance.

“We’re not going to move away from it. The world has changed so radically,” she said. “And the employees are the ones driving it. They’re the ones asking, ‘how are you supporting me? How do I belong here? What are the steps you’ve been taking to make sure that there’s representation here?’”

John Henderson, director of Learning and Development at the Employers Assoc. of the Northeast (EANE), agrees.

“In this politically and socially divisive world, how do we create a culture where people feel valued? That stems from the diversity, equity, and inclusion piece,” he said, before explaining what each of those terms means for EANE.

“As employees are more educated, they’re more authentic with themselves. And that creates a culture of self-value for employees, a stronger sense of belonging, which makes it easier for them to be fully engaged with the workforce.”

Specifically, he explained, diversity is about representation — not only in terms of race and gender, but in backgrounds, viewpoints, and experiences.

Then, “when you look at equity, it’s about recognition — recognizing what people need in order to be successful. As a business, what do my people need in order to be successful? And what you need and what I need might be totally different. That’s why equity is so important.”

Inclusion, meanwhile, is about the actions a business takes to make people feel like they’re included.

Dan Moriarty

Dan Moriarty says efforts to create a more diverse, inclusive workplace have to start at the top.
Staff Photo

“All three of those really create a sense of belonging. So it’s diversity, equity, and inclusion, and then you have the B, the belonging piece,” Henderson explained. “If I feel valued, if I feel trusted, if I feel I can be my authentic self at work, I feel like I belong.”

It’s a message more and more companies seem to be getting — and even reaching out for help in implementing, he added. “We do get a lot of calls and do trainings around that piece. We want people to understand that differences bring creativity and increased productivity. And when you foster a culture of respect and people feel that they belong, it increases retention rates, and it makes it easier to recruit people.”

Monson Savings Bank President Dan Moriarty has been actively been involved in DEI strategy for some time, not only at his own institution, but his past co-leadership of an executive council established by the Massachusetts Bankers Assoc. to promote DEI efforts across member institutions.

Adopting some best practices recommended by Mass Bankers, Monson Savings has created a DEI commitment statement, developed and implemented a DEI program that continues to evolve, provided DEI training to board members and employees, identified and monitored key performance metrics, and conducted periodic self-assessments of the program.

In addition, he said, the bank has reviewed numerous documents, including its strategic plan, along with communications, processes, and facilities, to ensure that potential barriers are identified and removed and that DEI expectations are reflected, while also conducting outreach and expanding the bank’s relationships with key community members and organizations.

John Henderson

John Henderson says businesses increasingly want to create a culture where people feel valued.
Staff Photo

“We’ve developed a program which is a lot about education and training, from board members to senior management to the entire staff,” Moriarty said, adding that the bank conducted an employee summit a few weeks ago to discuss topics aroud DEI that some might not be familiar with, and explaining the reasons why they’re important.

“As employees are more educated, they’re more authentic with themselves. And that creates a culture of self-value for employees, a stronger sense of belonging, which makes it easier for them to be fully engaged with the workforce,” he added. “If they feel valued, feel like they belong, they’ll be better employees and better people. I just want to enhance those communications and make DEI more transparent, both internally and externally.”

 

Welcomed, Valued, and Heard

Jackson Davis, who heads up the DEI program for MassMutual, said that organization’s strategy is focused on creating an environment that is equitable and inclusive for its employees, customers, business partners, and the communities it serves.

“When it comes to our workforce, we strive to create teams that reflect our customers and communities, fostering an environment where all employees are welcomed, valued, and heard,” Davis explained. “To do this, we’ve integrated DEI into all that we do, taking specific actions like monitoring and being transparent about our progress in increasing the overall diversity of our workforce, encouraging both a diverse candidate pool and interview panel for open positions, and providing employee benefits and supports that will help us attract and retain a diverse workforce.”

These benefits include a variety of things, from eight employee business resource groups to holistic, flexible benefits that are designed to meet the diverse, evolving needs of employees. And that investment in DEI isn’t just the right thing to do, he added; it pays off in many ways from a business perspective.

“Having a diverse workforce is important because it brings together different perspectives, which in turn can help us solve problems faster, innovate with more success, and go above and beyond for our customers in order to deliver them the best possible experience.”

“Having a diverse workforce is important because it brings together different perspectives, which in turn can help us solve problems faster, innovate with more success, and go above and beyond for our customers in order to deliver them the best possible experience,” Davis noted. “From a customer perspective, having a diverse and inclusive workforce allows us to better understand and meet the needs of those we serve.”

Bob Belitz, president and CEO of Tighe & Bond (see related story on page 20), agreed, noting that the civil-engineering firm’s roster of projects is so broad and affects so many different communities and demographics that it’s important to have team with backgrounds and experiences that are equally varied.

“I think that makes a difference, and we’re really committed to that because of the project portfolio we have,” he said. “We’re also trying to expand the schools that we recruit from, expanding our reach to produce more talent.”

A company that wants to be truly diverse may approach its strategy through many goals, Polite said, from training employees to recognize and prevent unconscious bias in their actions and comments to using gender-neutral language in outward communication, to making sure job postings and promotion opportunities reflect a commitment to diversity.

That doesn’t mean hiring based on checking demographic boxes, she added, but it may mean considering where and how employees are recruited — such as recruiting from a broader range of colleges or partnering with cultural organizations in the community or reaching out to staffing agencies that specialize in DEI.

“I also love it when I see employers have supplier diversity goals,” Polite said. “That tells an employee that they’re committed to diversity; that really shows inclusiveness as a organization. And that makes you, as a minority or someone from a different culture, feel more relaxed. It’s like, ‘OK, there is some commitment here.’ But if you don’t have those types of mechanisms set up, like how do you convey that to the job seeker? How do you convey that to your organization?”

 

Leading by Example

The answer to that question takes many forms, Polite said, but it has to begin at the top.

“You’ve got to start on the leadership level. Starting from the bottom up doesn’t typically work; you have to start from the top down. And you have to have some accountability with your initiatives, too.”

There, she paused for a moment to add that she’s trying to stay away from the word ‘initiatives’ when she talks to clients because it lacks a key sense of permanence.

“We’re trying to weave it into the employer mission, what they do every day. Initiatives change all the time, correct? So we want to make sure we’re not just doing initiatives; what can we can do on a daily basis?”

Henderson also spoke to the importance of executive leadership in crafting effective DEI strategies.

“We know it increases productivity, it increases employee engagement, it increases retention, and it makes it easier to recruit,” he said. “But some companies don’t know where to start; they’ll say to the HR person, ‘hey, create a DEI plan and implement it.’ And then the HR person has that responsibility.

“But it really has to come from the leadership,” he went on. “If the leadership is not a champion for any initiative, including DEI, it’s not going to stick. You can’t change the culture from the middle up or the bottom up. It has to come from leadership. When a leadership team decides it wants to focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, that’s a step in the right direction because it has to come from the top, not the middle.”

Moriarty agreed. “It has to start at the top. I had to start by providing leadership, advocating, training for DEI, and actively trying to foster a bank culture where we promote and support an environment where everyone feels valued and respected and has a strong sense of belonging. The goal is to have everyone be their authentic self at work.”

As Polite noted, it’s something companies of all types and sizes are taking seriously.

“I think employers are more committed than they’ve ever been. Even now, we still get a lot of requests for DEI training,” she said, adding quickly that the result must go beyond mere lip service.

“It still goes back to the commitment. As the leader of an organization, you have to draw the line and say, ‘this is what I’m going to commit to.’ A lot of employers have started to engage the topic of diversity and discrimination, and others have been too scared to touch it — not because they don’t believe in it, but they don’t want to offend, and they don’t know how to approach it.”

She recommends connecting with a consultant on hard questions — and, importantly, conducting internal surveys to gauge the workplace culture and reactions to any changes.

After all, Moriarty said, by creating a workplace where all feel welcome, the bank should become a more attractive employer for people from a variety of backgrounds.

“We’re fostering that culture where we can inspire our existing workforce, but also attract the diversity of experience from outside our walls, so they say, ‘hey, Monson Savings Bank is committed. They talk the talk and walk the walk.’”

The end goal, he noted, is a more diverse workplace, a more diverse vendor profile, and a more diverse customer base. “It’s definitely an ongoing journey along the path to do what’s right.”

Mid-year Tax Planning

By Contributor
Accounting and Tax Planning Special Coverage

With Legislation Stalled, 2024 Sees Few Changes

By Kristina D. Houghton, CPA

 

After overwhelming approval by the House Ways and Means Committee on Jan. 19, the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 was sent to the House under rules that would limit the ability to amend the text but would require approval by two-thirds of the chamber.

After a delay caused by a minor revolt of some GOP members who were trying to get an increase in the state and local tax deduction limit added to the bill as well as modifications of the child tax credit, an agreement was made to consider those in a separate bill in the near future, so the legislation passed by the House is the same version that was passed out of committee.

The bill provides for increases in the child tax credit, delays the requirement to deduct research and experimentation expenditures over a five-year period, reinstates the depreciation and amortization add-back through 2025 for purposes of calculating the business interest limitation, extends the 100% bonus depreciation through 2025, and increases the Code Sec. 179 deduction limitation, among other business-friendly provisions.

“Standard deduction amounts for 2024 have been inflation-adjusted and are higher than they were last year.”

Unfortunately, the Senate never addressed the bill. Due to the large number of provisions that are retroactively applicable to the 2023 tax year, and in some cases even earlier, the original hope was to get the bill passed before the start of the 2024 filing season. Since that deadline has passed, the goal is still to get the bill passed as soon as possible to minimize the administrative burdens on the IRS. There is no current date set for a Senate vote, and with this being an election year, the likelihood is slim.

As a result, planning for 2024 will not be much different than 2023, but let’s summarize the few changes, primarily inflation-related adjustments, effective for 2024. Pay attention to these changes because they can hurt or help your bottom line. Use this information now so you can hold on to more of your hard-earned money when it’s time to file your 2024 federal income tax return in early 2025.

 

Individual Tax Changes

Retirement Savings

Key dollar limits on workplace retirement plans and IRAs increase in 2024. The maximum 401(k) contribution is $23,000. People born before 1975 can contribute an extra $7,500. These limits also apply to 403(b) and 457 plans.

SIMPLEs have a $16,000 cap, plus $3,500 for individuals age 50 and older.

The 2024 contribution cap for traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs is $7,000, plus $1,000 as an additional catch-up contribution for individuals age 50 and older.

The income ceilings on Roth IRA pay-ins are higher for 2024. Contributions phase out at adjusted gross incomes of $230,000 to $240,000 for joint filers and $146,000 to $161,000 for single filers.

2024 deduction phaseouts for traditional IRAs range from adjusted gross incomes of $123,000 to $143,000 for joint filers covered by 401(k) plans and $77,000 to $87,000 for single filers and heads of household. If only one spouse is covered by the plan, the phaseout range for deducting pay-ins for the uncovered spouse is $230,000 to $240,000.

 

Adoption Tax Credit

The adoption credit is taken on up to $16,810 of qualified expenses in 2024. The full credit is available for a special-needs adoption even if it costs less. The credit phases out for filers with modified AGIs over $252,150 and ends at $292,150.

 

Standard Deduction

Standard deduction amounts for 2024 have been inflation-adjusted and are higher than they were last year.

The income-tax brackets for individuals are much wider for 2024 because of inflation during the 2023 fiscal year. Tax rates are unchanged.

 

Capital Gains and Qualified Dividends

The favorable tax rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends do not change. But the income thresholds to qualify for the various rates go up for 2024. The 0% tax rate applies at taxable incomes up to $94,050 for joint filers, $63,000 for heads of household, and $47,025 for single filers. The 20% tax rate starts at $583,751 for joint filers, $551,351 for heads of household, and $518,901 for single filers. The 15% tax rate is for filers with taxable incomes between the 0% and 20% break point.

The annual gift tax exclusion for 2024 is $18,000 per donee. That means in 2024, you can gift up to $18,000 ($36,000 if your spouse agrees) to each child, grandchild, or any other person without having to file a gift-tax return or tap your lifetime estate and gift tax exemption. Annual gifts over the exclusion amount will trigger filing of a gift tax return for 2024, but no gift tax will be due unless your total lifetime gifts exceed $13,610,000.

 

Business Tax Changes

Depreciation

First-year bonus depreciation isn’t as valuable in 2024. Last year, businesses could deduct 80% of the cost of new and used qualifying business assets with lives of 20 years or less. This year, the 80% writeoff decreases to 60%.

However, Section 179 expensing is higher. $1,220,000 of assets can be expensed in 2024. This limit phases out dollar for dollar once more than $3,050,000 of assets are put into use in 2024.

Note that the amount of business assets expensed can’t exceed the business’s taxable income. Bonus depreciation doesn’t have this rule.

 

Pass-through Income

A key dollar threshold on the 20% deduction for pass-through income rises in 2024. Self-employed individuals and owners of LLCs, S-corporations and other pass-throughs can deduct 20% of their qualified business income, subject to limitations for individuals with taxable incomes of more than $383,900 for joint filers and $191,950 for all others.

 

Conclusion

It is difficult to do tax planning in anticipation of what might happen in Washington, especially with this being an election year and the great divide on tax policy between the parties. Maybe the best planning would be to plan for possible tax changes in 2025 depending not only on the party that wins the presidential election, but also on the mark-up of the House and the Senate.

It could well be time to accelerate gifting, accelerate income, and postpone deductions. Perhaps with optimism, you can imagine that those postponed R&D and interest deductions will give you a deduction at a higher tax rate, and maybe this can lessen the pain of accepting possible increased tax rates.

Finally, remember that this article is intended to serve only as a general guideline. Your personal circumstances will likely require careful examination and should be discussed with your tax adviser.

 

Kristina D. Houghton, CPA is a partner at the Holyoke-based accounting firm Meyers Brothers Kalicka, P.C.

Developer for Clocktower Project Brings Impressive Track Record to Springfield

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Architect’s renderings of the Clocktower Building and the Colonial Block (below).
Commercial Real Estate Special Coverage

‘We Love Real Estate’

Architect’s renderings of the Clocktower Building and the Colonial Block (below).

Architect’s renderings of the Clocktower Building and the Colonial Block (below).
(Images courtesy of Pickard Chilton)

Colonial Block

Colonial Block

When Ed Woodbury was encouraged by close friend Tim Brangle, president of Chicago Consultants Studio, to closely consider the Clocktower Building project in Springfield, he immediately challenged him to back up that request.

“He said, ‘Ed … you should take a look at this,’” recalled Woodbury, president of Chicago-based McCaffery Interests, which has a wide and deep portfolio of urban development and redevelopment projects, many of them clustered in Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia, and the Windy City, and considers hundreds, if not thousands, of requests for proposals each year. “And I said, ‘why? Why do you think this is for us?’

“He spoke very highly of the city and its leadership, pointed out the inherent attributes of the Basketball Hall of Fame and the casino, and then gave a brief history of how Springfield had turned the corner from previous down times, if you will,” Woodbury said of Brangle, who has consulted with Springfield officials on the design of the casino and economic development surrounding it. “Naturally, none of that was familiar to us, so we looked at it, and the story happened to be true. And we liked that story.”

That’s a brief synopsis of how the Clocktower initiative, which involves three properties owned by the Springfield Redevelopment Authority — the Clocktower Building (113-117 State St.), the Colonial Block (1139-1155 Main St.), and a smaller building on Stockbridge Street — came to be part of that impressive portfolio.

On the McCaffery website, the project is listed among others like in size and character, including 1600 Smallman, the historic renovation of a 1921 structure in the Strip District of Pittsburgh into office spaces with views of the downtown skyline and the Allegheny River, and the Cork Factory project, an award-winning restoration and redevelopment of the Armstrong Cork Factory, also in Pittsburgh (more on that later).

In many ways, the Springfield project, which will add more than 90 units of market-rate housing to the mix, fits right in with these others, said Woodbury, adding that it involves redevelopment of historic properties, but also represents economic development and efforts to revitalize that area of the city.

“This will require multiple sources — you don’t just make one or two phone calls and someone says, ‘yeah, I like that project; I’ll fund it with you. It’s going to take more than a village — it’s going to take a little city.’”

“It’s a neat little project — it’s not big in our world,” Woodbury said of the Springfield initiative. “But I think we’re adding something to the downtown, both by the restoration but also through our development approach and how we look at projects and think about them.

“We don’t look at the buildings themselves,” he went on. “We look at the context of the buildings and where they sit — in this case, across from the casino and across from the MassMutual Center.”

From what he’s heard and seen himself — he’s now visited Springfield a few times — the city is in what he called the early stages of a rebirth, and this project could help bring it to the next stage.

“One of the things that adds to a rebirth is, in some cases, retail, but in a lot of cases, it’s getting people to live back downtown,” he said, “rather than working there, leaving there, and going back to their home in another part of town or one of the suburbs.”

While there are opportunities with this project, with a projected price tag of $55 million to $60 million, there are challenges as well, especially when it comes to funding, said Woodbury, listing the current economy and rising interest rates among those challenges, factors that will require more creativity when it comes to what he called the ‘capital stack,’ or the blend of resources that will be needed to make this project reality.

“This will require multiple sources — you don’t just make one or two phone calls and someone says, ‘yeah, I like that project; I’ll fund it with you,’” he said. “It’s going to take more than a village — it’s going to take a little city.”

Armstrong Cork Factory in Pittsburgh

Ed Woodbury says restoration of the Armstrong Cork Factory in Pittsburgh is one of several projects in the McCaffery Interests portfolio similar to the Springfield undertaking.
(Photo courtesy of Ed Massery)

The company has vast experience assembling needed funding, he went on, adding that he’s confident that the ‘little city’ he mentioned can come together, and that this project will play a significant role in Springfield reaching the next stages of a rebirth.

For this issue and its focus on commercial real estate, BusinessWest talked at length with Woodbury about McCaffery Interests, the Clocktower building project, and how this Springfield initiative fits the company’s mission — “to transform underutilized urban assets into dynamic destinations that serve modern lives as they intersect at work, home, and play.”

 

Landmark Decisions

Woodbury said McCaffery handles a broad range of work, from development to property management. And in that first category, it focuses on both redevelopment of existing (again, usually underutilized) properties to new construction.

But the common denominator, if you will, is that essentially all this work is carried out in cities.

“The focus has always been in urban areas,” he told BusinessWest. “We like the life, the vitality, and even the grit of cities.”

Most projects are in larger cities, including Pittsburgh, Chicago, D.C. and the surrounding area, and, most recently, Denver, where the company has several projects in various stages, including T3 RiNo, a mixed-use, 250,000-square-foot office project in that city’s burgeoning River North (RiNo) District.

“The focus has always been in urban areas. We like the life, the vitality, and even the grit of cities.”

Formed in 1991 by Dan McCaffery (Woodbury said he joined him “almost immediately”), the company’s first signature project was the revitalization of a former Saks Fifth Avenue store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

“We renovated it, leased it out, and put in Nike, Sony, and Cole Hahn; it was the height of what we call Main Street retail,” he recalled, adding that the project set the tone for other initiatives to come.

These include restoration of another historic property, 400 Post St. in San Francisco’s Union Square, that was destined to be torn down. “It was a great piece of real estate that had been overlooked for years,” Woodbury recalled. “We said, ‘heck, this is a cool, old building; let’s restore it.’ We put in a Disney store and a Borders Books.”

Reliance Building in Chicago

Restoration and redevelopment of the Reliance Building in Chicago, now home to the Hotel Burnham, is another project in the McCaffery portfolio similar to the one in Springfield.

As he cited those names, he noted that retail has certainly changed over the past few decades and especially the past several years; thus, the company now focuses mostly on mixed-use projects, be they new construction or renovation of existing structures, with retail on the ground floor and residential in the floors above — which is what is proposed for the Springfield project, as we’ll see.

And while McCaffery does most of its work in larger metropolitan areas, the company considers projects in communities across the country.

“We’re opportunity-focused — we search for unique opportunities and chase them,” Woodbury said. “The other thing is, we love real estate — old buildings, new buildings, it doesn’t matter; we love real estate.

“For us, it’s about finding high-quality real estate and exploring and seeing what we can do — with the land or existing properties,” he went on, adding that, with Springfield and its Clocktower Building initiative, what it can do — what it wants to do — is bring that aforementioned mix of uses, specifically retail on the ground floors and residential on the upper floors.

 

Lofty Expectations

Indeed, architect’s renderings of both the Clocktower Building and the Colonial Block portray well-lit shops with sidewalks crowded with passersby, elements certainly missing from the current picture — and missing for the past several years, in fact.

To make those colorful images become reality, McCaffery Interests will call on 34 years of experience with dozens of projects in several different cities and high levels of creativity with putting together a needed funding stack.

As he talked about the Springfield initiative, Woodbury said there are several projects in the portfolio that are somewhat similar — maybe not in terms of overall size and scope, but certainly in terms of restoring landmark properties, using historic tax credits to finance the work, and creating higher levels of vibrancy in downtowns or other key districts.

These include restoration and redevelopment of the Reliance Building in Chicago, now home to the Hotel Burnham, which was built in 1895 and is listed among the 100 most historically significant skyscrapers in the world.

“It’s one of the original high-rises in Chicago and one of the first places where an elevator was utilized in high-rise construction,” he explained. “We renovated it, but didn’t return it to an office building; we converted it to a hotel with restaurants on the ground floor.”

His short list also includes restoration of the Armstrong Cork Factory in Pittsburgh, originally constructed in 1901, and converted into 297 loft apartments, a project that earned several awards, including an Award for Excellence in 2009 from the Urban Land Institute and a Western Pennsylvania Golden Trowel Award in 2007.

“We took a building that was old and abandoned and invested side by side with a great partner in Pittsburgh and put the property on the historic register,” he said, adding that the project is one of the key contributors to growing vibrancy in the Strip District.

Springfield’s Clocktower Building and Colonial Block are similar in that they both boast considerable amounts of history — and have been largely vacant for several years now.

And, in Woodbury’s estimation, they have a future that can be as significant as their past.

“The Clocktower Building has great bones to it, and it’s the same with the Colonial Block,” he said. “The Clocktower Building is older, and some of the renovations over the years have unfortunately disrupted its historic character, but it adds a nice scale to the street — State and Main — which is fun to say, because it’s literally State and Main.

“And the Colonial Block was originally residential on the upper floors, which lends itself nicely to converting it back to that,” he went on, adding that, overall, Springfield is “looking forward being optimistic about what a city can and should be — and those are the kinds of places where we like to work.”

As for the challenges ahead, especially funding, Woodbury returned to that notion of this project needing not a village, but a small city of resources contributing to the capital stack.

“Federal and state tax credits are going to be a big source — they will be the lead bell cow in our funding stack,” he explained. “But there will be some funding needed from the State House, there might be some funding needed from the city, and then there’s obviously some private monies to be put in place as well; all of those food groups will come into play.”

The overall goal is to start construction late this year or early next year, he said, adding that it will be 24 months from when the company submits final drawings until the first tenants — residential and commercial — can move in.

Woodbury is confident this goal can be met, and equally confident that this initiative can do what so many other projects in the McCaffery portfolio have: revitalize not only real estate, but entire neighborhoods and cities.

Lenox Continues to Be a Destination Community

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Shakespeare & Company’s 33-acre campus in Lenox is open to the public for picnics and exploration of its grounds.
Community Spotlight

Community Spotlight

Shakespeare & Company’s 33-acre campus in Lenox is open to the public for picnics and exploration of its grounds.

Shakespeare & Company’s 33-acre campus in Lenox is open to the public for picnics and exploration of its grounds.

Becky Piccolo says the Olde Heritage Tavern is the ‘Cheers’ of Lenox.

It’s a place where … well, most everyone knows your name. Indeed, while it’s a popular hangout for locals, those in town for a concert at Tanglewood, a play at Shakespeare & Company, or a massage at one of the spas might well stop in for a burger and a brew as well.

“It’s a gathering place for all the locals,” she said of the tavern, which has been called both a second home for area residents and a home away from home. “It’s really a big family and a big part of the community; it’s way more than just a bar.”

Piccolo and her sister, Rachel, have been managing the tavern for more than 20 years now, but through a series of transactions and changes in ownership, including a time when the U.S. government took possession (we’ll get into all that later), they can now call the establishment theirs.

“The Airbnb phenomenon has certainly impacted us, as it has almost every community in the States and overseas as well. A lot of the modest homes have been purchased by owner/investors that have crowded out the younger families and empty-nest households perhaps looking to downsize to more modest homes.”

And when asked what might change with this latest change in ownership, Piccolo was proud to say, “nothing, really — we’re just going to keep doing what we’ve always done.”

This is certainly good news for the town and its business community, and this change of ownership at the tavern is just one of many developing stories in this community of 5,000 people that is perhaps the tourist mecca in a region built largely on tourism.

Other stories include, on the municipal side, movement toward a new public-safety facility and new wastewater treatment plant, and, perhaps most importantly, steps forward in the development of two new housing projects, which will, according to Select Board member Marybeth Mitts, make a meaningful dent in what has become a serious shortage of affordable housing.

That’s a problem common to communities of all sizes and across Western Mass., said Mitts, adding that it is perhaps even more acute in Lenox because of its wealth of tourism and wellness facilities and an accompanying trend that has seen many properties in — or close to — the ‘affordable’ category converted to Airbnbs.

“The Airbnb phenomenon has certainly impacted us, as it has almost every community in the States and overseas as well,” she noted. “A lot of the modest homes have been purchased by owner/investors that have crowded out the younger families and empty-nest households perhaps looking to downsize to more modest homes.”

Lenox at a glance

Year Incorporated: 1767
Population: 5,095
Area: 21.7 square miles
County: Berkshire
Residential Tax Rate: $9.07
Commercial Tax Rate: $12.85
Median Household Income: $85,581
Median Family Income: $111,413
Type of Government: Select Board, Open Town Meeting
Largest Employers: Canyon Ranch, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Kimball Farms
* Latest information available

This development, and the overall lack of affordable housing, has many side effects and has made it even more difficult for the town’s rich stock of restaurants and tourist attractions to find enough help, said Mitts, adding that many restaurants are able to open maybe five days a week instead or six or seven because of staffing issues.

“It has impacted the ability of our village shops and eateries to have the summer staffs that they’ve enjoyed the past several decades,” Mitts explained. “Kids grow up, and they start busing in the restaurants and working in the local retail establishments in the summertime to help with seasonal employment needs. And now, those kids are becoming fewer and far between, and it’s harder for those restaurants to be open seven days a week in the summer because they just don’t have the staff.”

The two new housing projects — a 65-unit, mixed-income development that should break ground in the next 90 days, and a 68-unit project in the earlier stages of development — should bring some relief, but more new housing is needed.

Meanwhile, on the business side, Lenox continues the process of making a full recovery from COVID. The pandemic obviously hit this community hard, and in the years immediately after the height of COVID, when people could go back out and do things, many took their time getting back into that rhythm.

But Piccolo said the town is primed for a big year in 2024.

“Lenox has been hopping; last year was a great year, and Tanglewood’s lineup for this year looks even better,” she said. “I think this summer is going to be a record-breaking summer.”

Jaclyn Stevenson, director of Marketing & Communications for Shakespeare & Company, was similarly optimistic.

A member of the Lenox Cultural District, she said the community’s many attractions are working together — perhaps more than ever before — to promote the sum of all that’s going on (the busy season started Memorial Day weekend, builds through the summer, and peaks in August) and generate some intrigue.

“The cultural organizations in Lenox, including some of the retail spaces, have been working together more than they have in previous years,” she said, citing as reasons everything from the pandemic to turnover, both in Town Hall and in those retail spaces. “That spirit of collaboration is starting to come back.”

For this, the latest installment of its Community Spotlight series, BusinessWest turns its lens on Lenox, a community that continues to build on its long legacy of being a true destination community.

 

At Home with the Idea

Mitts isn’t from Lenox — she was born in Hartford, Conn. and subsequently lived in many different places, from Washington, D.C. to Detroit to Manchester, Conn., and then back to West Hartford — but came to this picturesque community just south of Pittsfield in 2001 and has raised a family here.

While doing so, she’s made a point of getting involved. Indeed, in addition to serving on the Select Board, she’s been involved with the Cultural Council and was, until recently, chair of the Affordable Housing Trust, and is currently running for state representative as an independent.

Marybeth Mitts

Marybeth Mitts

“We have a pretty robust rooms and meals tax here in town that keeps us very well-situated so that we can maintain a consistently conservative tax rate.”

She said the town’s business community is top-heavy with tourism and wellness institutions, including anchors such as Canyon Ranch; the Miraval Berkshires Resort & Spa (formerly Cranwell Resort); the Mount (Edith Wharton’s home); Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; the Mass Audubon Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary; Shakespeare & Company; and many others.

“We have a pretty robust rooms and meals tax here in town that keeps us very well-situated so that we can maintain a consistently conservative tax rate,” Mitts noted. “We’re able to stick to the Proposition 2½ restrictions, and we’ve never had to go for an override; we’re not anywhere near our tax limit.”

This strong fiscal balance sheet will be a real asset as the town faces some needed infrastructure projects, she said, starting with a new, $25 million public-safety facility she described as “hugely necessary.”

“That’s because our Police Department is located in the basement of our town hall, and our fire trucks constantly have to be modified to fit our inadequate and tiny fire station,” she said, adding that a new facility that will bring both departments together will be built at the corner of Housatonic Street and Route 7, a somewhat central location outside the village center.

Also planned is a new wastewater-treatment plant, she said, adding that this project, with a projected $40 million price tag, is due to commence over the next 12 to 18 months.

Another huge issue for the community is housing, Mitts said, adding that there was already a shortage before the Airbnb crush made things considerably worse.

Indeed, she said many modestly priced smaller homes and also several multi-family homes have been converted into Airbnbs.

“Some of the two- and four-unit homes that had either smaller families in them or people who want to stay in town but don’t have large families anymore have been converted to Airbnbs,” she said. “I know specifically of the case of a fourplex that was purchased; there were two small families and two individuals who were living in apartments in this fourplex, and they were essentially evicted so that this person could rehab it and turn it four Airbnbs and charge $3,000 a month for those units.

“One of those individuals was someone who worked in the arts in town and was able to affordably live in town and maintain their livelihood,” she went on. “But now, the need to pay an additional amount of rent and try to find an affordable rental unit … it’s become difficult to impossible, and other people who were essentially evicted and had children in the school district were now looking for places to live so their children could stay in the school district, and I believe one of them wound up living with their mother in another town because they couldn’t find a place to live.”

There are many similar stories, Mitts said, adding that the planned new housing developments — that 65-unit project, to be called Brushwood Farms, and the 68-unit complex currently working its way through the funding and approval processes — may enable more young families to come to Lenox and more empty nesters to stay.

“If that project gets approved, we’ll be adding 133 units to our affordable rental housing stock,” she said, adding that eight of the Brushwood Farms units will be for families, with three bedrooms, in addition to 28 two-bedroom units and the rest with one bedroom.

 

Bar None

Tracing her long history at the Olde Heritage Tavern, Becky Piccolo said she has managed it for several different owners.

That includes John McNinch, who acquired it in 2000 and later sold it to FTX digital bitcoin magnate Ryan Salame, who would eventually enter guilty pleas on two criminal counts — making an estimated $24 million in unlawful political contributions and conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

As fallout from those charges, the U.S. Marshals Service took possession of the 12 Housatonic St. property, as well as some other properties Salame owned in Lenox, and Piccolo essentially managed the tavern for the federal government while it arranged an auction.

“We’re operating normally; it’s business as usual, the staff is happy, so it’s ‘keep on trucking’ here,” she told the Berkshire Eagle the day after the U.S. Marshals Service took possession.

And those same sentiments apply today, after Annie Selke, serial entrepreneur and founder of the Annie Selke Companies, prevailed at that aforementioned auction in April and in turn sold the tavern to the Piccolo sisters.

Indeed, when asked what it felt like to own the landmark instead of managing it for someone else, including the government, Piccolo said, “I run it the same. It’s just kind of like who I am; I’ve been here for so long.

“It’s a huge part of my life, and it continues,” she went on. “It’s like nothing changes; it’s like I never skipped a beat.”

Elaborating on what she said earlier, Piccolo said she is planning just a few small changes, but is largely invoking the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ philosophy, and in most all respects, the tavern isn’t broken.

Instead, it has grown from being purely a place for locals — a dive bar, by many accounts — to a destination for those coming to Lenox to take in its many attractions.

That list includes Shakespeare & Company, which has an intriguing season planned for 2024. It includes a few traditional Shakespeare plays — The Comedy of Errors and The Winter’s Tale (in this case, an ‘enhanced reading.’ But it also features other offerings, including a world premiere of The Islanders, starting July 25; a regional premiere of Flight of the Monarch, described as a “darkly comic play that explores how siblings’ lives are intertwined”; the world premiere of Three Tall Persian Women, a “comedic and touching play about generational differences, grief, control, and learning to let go, but more than anything it’s a love story to immigrant mothers”; and Shake It Up: A Shakespeare Cabaret.

That eclectic lineup is part of what should be another summer and early fall of building more momentum in Lenox, said Stevenson, who returned to that notion of collaboration among the tourism institutions at this pivotal time for the community.

“We do a lot of art walks, art weeks, and music; Lenox loves music. These are things that happen year-round and are held at different locations, different venues, year to year,” she said, adding that Shakespeare & Company recently staged a Community Day (an open house of sorts with events that also showcased area nonprofits), and other venues have staged similar gatherings.

Collectively, they build not only awareness, but a sense of community, hence the name, said Stevenson, adding that the cultural district works to call attention to all different kinds of artists, promote diversity in the arts, and, in general, celebrate and promote the community’s rich inventory of restaurants and things to do.

Early Education Seeks Innovative Solutions to Attract a Workforce

By
Dawn DiStefano, seen here with a group of Square One kids
Healthcare News

Earning and Learning

Dawn DiStefano, seen here with a group of Square One kids

Dawn DiStefano, seen here with a group of Square One kids, says early education isn’t a career for everyone, but those with the right mindset and heart for it will find robust opportunities there.

Dawn DiStefano says early education is “not a career path for the faint of heart,” or something to just settle on.

But for the right person, she added, it can be highly rewarding.

“You’ve got to have the interest and skills and tenacity and heart to want to work with young children. You can’t be, ‘there’s nothing else I want to do, so I’ll try my hand in childcare,’” said DiStefano, president and CEO of Square One, quickly adding that someone with those qualities she mentioned will find a field bursting with opportunity.

“If people don’t want to work in the early-education and childcare space, it prohibits others from going to work,” she said. “Businesses are hiring, and people want to go to work, but they need a place for their children to be.”

Recognizing challenges in the early-education space, the state established what’s known as the Early Education and Child Care Task Force earlier this year, focusing on the essential role childcare plays in driving the state’s economy and competitiveness — and, for that matter, the health and well-being of its families.

“Affordable, accessible, and quality childcare is a significant infrastructure needed in Massachusetts, and an imperative to drive the state’s economic competitiveness,” Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Lauren Jones said when the program was announced. “I look forward to working with my colleagues across government and with business and community partners to build a strong pipeline of early childhood educators and also enhance the system to encourage our untapped talent to fully participate in our workforce.”

“If people don’t want to work in the early-education and childcare space, it prohibits others from going to work. Businesses are hiring, and people want to go to work, but they need a place for their children to be.”

The pipeline has been solid at Square One, DiStefano said.

“Why do people want to work here? It’s not like our kids are any easier than other kids; they’re all children. But a lot of it has to do with the culture and environment at Square One. We invest in you early on, whether as a young person, just starting out in your career, or as an older adult with a midlife change of heart.”

While entry-level wages aren’t the main draw in any early-education setting, she added, Square One lays out the long-term picture. “We say, ‘here’s the career pathway. Here’s what it looks like, and we’ll be flexible with your schedule, if you want to take advantage of free classes at HCC and STCC.’”

Indeed, in recent years, the state has been actively investing in early education in a number of ways, including free programs at its 15 community colleges through the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care’s (EEC) Career Pathways Grant.

One of those, the Family Childcare Institute at Springfield Technical Community College, is currently running June 3 through July 9.

“This is a three-course bundle that will help new family childcare providers get licensed and learn how to run a childcare program in their home,” said Nancy Ward, Career Pathways Grant and Activity director at STCC. “We see this as a great opportunity for anyone who wants to open their own home-based childcare center.”

Christopher Thuot, vice president of Academic Affairs at STCC, added that such programs reduce barriers to help people in the community obtain an education. “The flexibility of the program accommodates individuals with varying schedules and commitments.”

 

State of Urgency

Meanwhile, applications for the state’s Early Childhood Educators scholarship are now open for the 2024-25 academic year. This scholarship is available for educators who work at programs licensed and/or funded by the EEC, including center-based, family childcare, and out-of-school-time programs.

And for the first time, the scholarship is available for staff who work at residential programs licensed by the EEC. The application process has also been simplified, and eligible majors have been expanded to better support career pathways for out-of-school-time educators.

“We know that far too many parents find it difficult to return to the workforce because of the high cost of childcare, and providers are facing the difficult decision between continuing in the profession they love or leaving for a higher-paid career.”

“Our administration is fully committed to supporting and expanding the early-education and care workforce. When programs have high-quality educators, they can offer better care to even more families,” Gov. Maura Healey said. “I know these important changes to the Early Childhood Educators scholarship will strengthen our supports for our hardworking afterschool educators and residential program staff, positively reinforcing a pipeline of high-quality early-education professionals.”

More than 500 scholarships were awarded for the 2023-24 academic year, an increase over the number awarded in the previous year​. As of this year, the scholarship now covers additional majors, including human services, psychology, social work, elementary education, and special education.

“Our Early Childhood Educators scholarship supports educators and program leaders to advance their careers and ensure that our youngest learners are receiving the highest-quality education they deserve, setting them up for school and lifetime success,” Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler said. “I am grateful to our departments of Early Education and Care and Higher Education for their partnership and collaboration with early educators and community partners in making this scholarship even better, reflecting current higher-education pathways and expanding access in a simpler way.”

As noted earlier, the state has also established the Early Education and Child Care Task Force, recognizing the role childcare plays in driving the state’s economy and competitiveness — at a time when keeping residents and businesses from fleeing the Commonwealth, for reasons ranging from housing to cost of living, has become a significant concern.

“If you support folks, get them into the industry by paying them to learn, they’ll probably be more motivated to work for you full-time as an employee. And in our field, we are desperate to strengthen our workforce.”

“We know that far too many parents find it difficult to return to the workforce because of the high cost of childcare, and providers are facing the difficult decision between continuing in the profession they love or leaving for a higher-paid career,” Healey said. “Childcare is central to the success of our entire state — for affordability, education, workforce, equity, and our economic potential — and together we are taking important steps toward solutions.”

The Early Education and Child Care Task Force will engage with industry and business leaders, organized labor, health-services stakeholders, housing and planning experts, working parents and caregivers, and childcare providers and experts in order to craft recommendations aligned with the following five policy objectives:

• Surveying practices of other states in reducing costs, increasing capacity, and improving quality of childcare providers and making recommendations for how such practices could be adopted in Massachusetts;

• Assessing how better coordination among state agencies could support families in accessing childcare that meets their needs, including through technology improvements;

• Identifying resources for building capacity and increasing affordability in the state’s mixed-delivery childcare system, including from the federal government, the philanthropic community, and employers, which may include exploring incentives for employers to assist employees with child care;

• Identifying strategies to recruit, train, upskill, and retain members of the childcare workforce, including by expanding apprenticeship initiatives, higher-education programs, and training opportunities; and

• Reviewing existing assets to identify potential locations to establish center-based care.

“Childcare and early education are critical enablers for economic growth in Massachusetts,” Secretary of Economic Development Yvonne Hao said. “Through this task force, the administration will take a whole-of-government approach to ensure that the state has equitable childcare solutions to meet the needs of the workforce and economy, making Massachusetts the best place to raise a family, grow a business, and succeed in a fulfilling career.”

 

Thinking Outside the Box

DiStefano said she’s excited about a new, state-level push for an apprenticeship model for early education, similar to buiding trades like electrical, plumbing, carpentry, and HVAC, where young people are paid to gain experience as they learn.

“People need to work and earn a living. People do not want to go to a four-year college and come out with debt for a $17-an-hour job. And we know our industry doesn’t start off very strong with hourly wage,” she noted. “So you’ve got to be creative. I’m excited about this potential apprenticeship model, where you’re paid to learn.

“It’s a balance, much like in other trades, like plumbing or electricity, where you go to work and you’re also training in the classroom to strengthen your formal education. And you’re getting paid to do all that, whether it’s by the business community or the philanthropic community or in a government-supported way.

“If you support folks, get them into the industry by paying them to learn, they’ll probably be more motivated to work for you full-time as an employee,” she went on. “And in our field, we are desperate to strengthen our workforce.”

What seems to be emerging, DiStefano said, is a realization that statewide investments in early education will pay off exponentially in the broader economy, allowing parents to work and businesses to retain talent.

And whether it’s through expanded scholarships, free community-college programs, or innovative apprenticeship initiatives, the impact is the same: more people able to work, learn, and generate income while doing it.

“There’s no better selling point,” she told BusinessWest. “The field of childcare and early learning is looking at the model of the trades and saying, ‘maybe we can do that.’ So I’m excited about the changes in our workforce development. This is an exciting moment to be in this field.”

Baystate NP Testifies on Boosting Minority Healthcare Providers

By
Jaines Andrades
Healthcare News

A Local Voice in Washington

Jaines Andrades

Jaines Andrades says scholarship opportunities and ways to access funding need to be made more available to minority students — and more community-college programs should be tuition-free.

On May 2, Jaines Andrades, a nurse practitioner at Baystate Medical Center in the Trauma and Surgery unit, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Healthcare, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) about ways to minimize the shortage of minority healthcare providers.

Andrades was invited to testify by Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana based on her now-famous story of climbing the ranks in her healthcare career. Featured on CNN, Good Morning America, People magazine, and more, she first caught national attention in 2020 when she posted a photo of each of her hospital badges to social media, showing her progression from custodian to registered nurse to nurse practitioner, all in the same hospital.

Following a screening process with representatives of the bipartisan committee members, the Chicopee resident was invited to be part of the panel, which included three other healthcare professionals, to help senators learn about ways to decrease barriers between minority students.

At the Capitol Hill hearing, Andrades shared her story of struggling to figure out a way to afford a college education which would lead to an career with economic stability while she was a student at Putnam High School in Springfield. She told lawmakers that, by chance, she met a nurse who encouraged her to consider the profession.

She decided to take a job that would help her learn more about healthcare while completing prerequisites at Holyoke Community College, so she could enroll in a bachelor of nursing science program at Elms College, and eventually earn a doctorate of nursing practice degree. She said working with nurses was how she learned how to make the next step in her education feasible.

“Making students at all schools, most especially those in underserved areas, aware of healthcare as an attainable career opportunity would go far, letting these students know it is within their reach and that there are resources available to them as they embark on the journey to higher education.”

“I began working in environmental services, as a custodian, at Baystate Medical Center. I worked to keep surgery and procedure rooms clean. This gave me the opportunity to see, first-hand, what nurses did, what I would need to know to move ahead in a healthcare environment, and to get advice on how to proceed in my career,” Andrades said. “My colleagues also offered incredible insight on ways I hadn’t thought of to fund my education. They pointed me toward resources like the Western Mass. Community Foundation, where I had access to scholarships and interest-free loans.”

Based on her experience, Andrades recommended to senators that education be made more affordable through tuition-free community college. She also suggested that scholarship opportunities and information on ways to access funding need to be made more available to minority students.

She recommended programs like the Baystate Springfield Educational Partnership, which allows students from Springfield to learn about healthcare careers inside the hospital, get more funding, and be implemented in areas where minority students live. She said these programs give students the chance to consider different career options before entering college and provide mentorship from professionals already working in medical professions. She said by participating in these programs, students often see themselves represented among advanced-practice providers and physicians and are more likely to see these professions as realistic possibilities. It also gives them exposure to pathways and resources to pursue their careers.

“I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to testify before some of the nation’s most instrumental lawmakers. It was an honor to share my experience and insight, and to represent my community and Baystate Health.”

“Robust college and career planning is very critical. Making students at all schools, most especially those in underserved areas, aware of healthcare as an attainable career opportunity would go far, letting these students know it is within their reach and that there are resources available to them as they embark on the journey to higher education,” Andrades said.

Of the experience, she said she is honored to represent her community, Baystate Health, and the nursing profession. Always eager to help raise awareness and share her story, she hopes her words will resonate in Washington and beyond.

“I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to testify before some of the nation’s most instrumental lawmakers. It was an honor to share my experience and insight, and to represent my community and Baystate Health,” Andrades said. “I hope the senators will take my suggestions under consideration, but most of all, I hope my story reaches one person who will be inspired by it and find a way to pursue their own dreams.”

Eversource Offers Advice for Working Around Electricity

By Contributor
Building Trades

Safety First

 

As the weather warms up and people spend more time outside getting their yards and homes ready for the summer, it’s important to keep safety in mind before taking on that next project, especially when dealing with electricity. Eversource is reminding customers that working around electric lines or equipment can be dangerous or even fatal if proper precautions aren’t taken.

“Safety is something we think about every day; it’s part of our daily workflow and is ingrained in all that we do,” Eversource Vice President of Safety Ken Bogler said. “Our crews work around electric equipment in all kinds of weather conditions and receive extensive training to make sure any repair, upgrade, or maintenance work is done as safely as possible. We want to make sure our customers are armed with the information they need so they can remain vigilant and take the necessary precautions when around electric equipment.”

“We want to make sure our customers are armed with the information they need so they can remain vigilant and take the necessary precautions when around electric equipment.”

Customers should always assume power lines are live. Anyone planning to work outside with ladders or power tools should know exactly where electric equipment is located, know what it’s touching, and have a plan to avoid it. Even a quick brush against an energized wire can cause serious harm.

Eversource encourages all customers to keep these additional safety tips in mind throughout the year:

 

Outdoor Safety Tips

• Don’t touch anything or anyone that’s touching a downed wire.

• Stay as far away as possible from downed wires and fallen trees that could have wires caught in them. Broken power equipment can feed electricity directly into the ground, charging the ground.

• For anyone in an accident with a car or other vehicle near a downed power line, stay in the vehicle until an Eversource worker or first responder says it’s safe to exit.

• Call before you dig. Call 811 or (888) 344-7233 at least three days prior to digging so that utilities can mark underground wires, cables, and pipelines.

• Keep kites, Mylar party balloons, model planes, and drones far away from power lines.

• Always store electrical equipment indoors and never use corded power tools in wet or damp conditions.

 

Indoor Safety Tips

• Avoid touching any bare wires, faulty appliances, or electrical outlets; always assume a wire or electrical appliance is energized.

• Cover unused wall outlets with plastic safety caps to protect small children and pets; consider installing tamper-resistant receptacles if your outlets do not currently have them to prevent foreign objects, other than electrical plugs, from being inserted into the outlet.

• Never overload outlets by using multiple adapters or power strips as this can cause overheating and fire.

• Regularly check wires and extension cords for signs of wear and replace those that are frayed or cracked.

• Keep an all-purpose fire extinguisher on every floor of a home; never attempt to put out an electrical fire with water.

• Install outlets with a ground fault circuit interrupter in rooms where water and moisture are present.

• Unplug appliances while cleaning or repairing them.

 

New Big Y Store Remodels Focus on Sustainability

By
Michael D’Amour says he can envision 100 or more supermarkets
Building Trades

Food for Thought

Big Y has been making significant strides in enhancing its stores across the region. Since 2022, the company has celebrated the grand reopening of 26 remodeled stores, which align with the company’s broader strategy to focus on sustainability and modernize retail spaces to create a more enjoyable shopping experience for both customers and associates.

The new store design incorporates modern elements to inspire guests and reflect each store’s local community. The remodeled stores have been strategically laid out to benefit both shoppers and associates, streamlining operations and creating a more pleasant environment, said Maggie D’Amour, senior manager of Environmental Social Governance.

“Whenever we remodel or build new stores, we always try to upgrade to energy-efficient equipment, motors, refrigeration systems, etc.,” she explained. “Big Y’s commitment to sustainability and community-focused design is evident in these remodels. As we continue to invest in our stores, we aim to meet customers wherever they are, providing a modern, highly connected shopping experience.”

These energy-efficiency-focused upgrades across Connecticut and Massachusetts have included high-efficiency rooftop and refrigeration systems, interior and exterior LED lighting (95% of stores), light-dimming systems, Energy Star-certified equipment, building energy-management systems, night curtains or glass-door retrofits on open refrigerated cases, high-efficiency motors, capture and utilization of waste heat, cycling anti-sweat heaters, waterless urinals, low-flow water controls on sinks, and energy-efficient hand dryers.

“Big Y’s commitment to sustainability and community-focused design is evident in these remodels. As we continue to invest in our stores, we aim to meet customers wherever they are, providing a modern, highly connected shopping experience.”

As a result, the stores are now saving 9.3 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, the equivalent of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by removing 840 gasoline-powered vehicles from area roads for a year.

In addition to the remodeled stores, Big Y also installed a 1.4-megawatt solar array on the rooftop of its Fresh and Local Distribution Center in Springfield. The installation is comprised of 3,100 solar panels, and the renewable energy generated by the system will offset about 70% of the distribution center’s electric requirements.

Expanded in 2021, Big Y’s Fresh and Local Distribution Center provides local farmers and food producers with an efficient, one-stop location that saves them time and money as they don’t need to deliver to individual stores. In addition to supporting communities, farms, and other small businesses, it saves travel time, thus cutting down on greenhouse-gas emissions. It also serves as a hub for all fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year.

Over the past three years, there has been a company-wide effort to be earth-friendly, with initiatives demonstrating a commitment to expanding solar-energy adoption and addressing environmental challenges. Overall, these changes have reduced the company’s total energy consumption by more than 17,800,000 kilowatt-hours.

The new solar panels are in addition to more than four megawatts of ground-mounted and rooftop arrays installed at several store locations. The company also participates in more than 10 community solar-array projects, creating solar production equivalent to annual C02 emissions from 5,142,780 gallons of gasoline consumed, 8,893 homes’ electricity use for one year, or 105,814 barrels of oil consumed.

Food waste is another major initiative for the grocery chain. Throughout the year, Big Y makes daily donations of meat, fresh produce, and bakery products, along with grocery, frozen food, and dairy items, to four food banks within its two-state marketing area. These donations not only help keep food waste out of landfills, it also helps maximize access to nutritious food and other resources that support food security for those at risk of hunger.

Fallon Health Welcomes Dr. Jean Jaoude to Massachusetts Program

By
Insurance

Keeping the PACE

Fallon Health announced the recent appointment of Dr. Jean Jaoude as vice president and medical director of its Massachusetts Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), locally called Summit ElderCare. In this role, Jaoude is responsible for supervising the medical care delivery of approximately 1,400 participants enrolled in the organization’s five PACE centers in Massachusetts, located in Leominster, Lowell, Springfield, Webster, and Worcester.

The primary goal of PACE is to allow older adults to live independently in their homes and communities instead of a nursing home, while maintaining or enhancing their quality of life with a dedicated care team, transportation, full medical care, and opportunities for socialization.

Dr. Jean Jaoude

Dr. Jean Jaoude brings deep experience in family medicine, geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care to his new role with Fallon Health’s PACE program.

Jaoude comes to Fallon Health with deep experience in family medicine, geriatrics, hospice, and palliative care. Most recently, he served as chief medical director of the Supportive and Palliative Care department within the ChristianaCare Health System in Newark, Del. Prior to that, he was chief medical officer for Baystate Home Health’s Hospice and Community Palliative Care division in Springfield. He has also served as a volunteer physician for free medical clinics for underserved populations in Iowa and was a missionary in South Africa providing education and free hospice care for underserved communities.

Jaoude is board-certified in family, geriatric, and hospice and palliative medicine. He earned his medical degree from Lebanese University in Lebanon and a master of health care administration degree from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. He also holds a medical director certification from the American Medical Assoc. Society for Post-acute and Long-term Care Medicine and completed the Physician Leadership Academy of the American College of Physician Executives at UnityPoint Clinic in Des Moines, Iowa. He is multi-lingual and is fluent in written and spoken Arabic, French, and English.

He is an active member of the American Assoc. for Physician Leadership, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Medical Director Assoc., the American Geriatrics Society, and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, as well as the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

The PACE model is centered on the core belief that given a choice, most elders, the disabled, and their families would choose to receive care in their homes and communities rather than in a nursing home. All PACE programs feature several essential components:

• An interdisciplinary team made up of healthcare and social-service professionals, such as doctors, nurse practitioners, physical and occupational therapists, social workers, and nurses;

• An individualized healthcare plan for each participant that outlines what services are needed to stay safe and healthy; and

• A PACE center that serves as the hub of services and activities, including a doctor’s office, rehabilitation gym, and social-work offices, as well as an activities center. Once enrolled in PACE, most medical services are provided at the PACE center, although services may be provided in the home or at another facility.

Backed by nearly 30 years of experience in PACE, Fallon Health boasts the largest PACE program in New England and among the largest in the country. The not-for-profit healthcare organization also operates a PACE program in Western New York.

Your Annual Guide to the Region’s Summer Happenings

By
Special Coverage Travel and Tourism

Hot Times Ahead

Summertime is a great time to get away, but in Western Mass., it’s also a great time to stick around and enjoy the many events on the calendar. Whether you’re craving fair food or craft beer, live music or arts and crafts, historical experiences or small-town pride, or sports ranging from baseball and 3-on-3 basketball to motocross and boat racing, the region boasts plenty of ways to celebrate the summer months. Admittedly, the following 20 events only scratch the surface, so we encourage you to get out and explore everything else that makes summer in Western Mass. a memorable time.

 

Valley Blue Sox

Valley Blue Sox

Valley Blue Sox

MacKenzie Stadium, 500 Beech St., Holyoke

valleybluesox.pointstreaksites.com/view/valleybluesox

Admission: $7; 12 games, $59; season tickets, $99

Now through July 30: Western Mass. residents don’t have to trek to Boston to catch quality baseball. The Valley Blue Sox, two-time champions of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, play the home half of their 44-game schedule close to home at MacKenzie Stadium in Holyoke. Frequent promotional events like postgame fireworks and giveaways help make every game a fun, affordable event for the whole family.

 

Westfield Starfires

Bullens Field, 181 Notre Dame St., Westfield

www.westfieldstarfires.com

Admission: $10; 20 games, $99; season tickets, $140

Now through Aug. 4: Still can’t get enough baseball? Celebrating their sixth season of action, the Starfires, a member of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League of New England, play a slightly longer schedule (56 games) than the Blue Sox. The team plays at Bullens Field in a city with a rich baseball history, and peppers its games with plenty of local flavor and fan experiences.

 

Juneteenth Jubilee

Juneteenth Jubilee

Juneteenth Jubilee

Downtown Springfield

facebook.com/juneteenthspfldma2023

Admission: Free

June 14-15: Juneteenth is a federal holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the U.S. two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Juneteenth in Springfield will celebrate this holiday with two days of activities, including a flag raising at the Black Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Mason Square and an adult block party at Level 5 restaurant on June 14, and a family fun day featuring music, kids’ activities, youth and business award presentationsl, complimentary food from Black-owned restaurants, and more.

 

Worthy Craft Beer Showcase

201 Worthington St., Springfield

www.theworthybrewfest.com

Admission: $50

June 15: Smith’s Billiards and Theodores’ Booze, Blues & BBQ, both in the city’s entertainment district, will host more than two dozen breweries at an event that also features live music and plenty of food. The event will also feature a home-brew contest; Loophole Brewing will make the winner’s beer and serve it at next year’s Brew Fest. Designated drivers pay reduced admission of $10.

 

Green River Festival

One College Dr., Greenfield

www.greenriverfestival.com

Admission: One-day passes, $79.99 to $89.99; two-day passes, $145; weekend passes, $99.99 for teens, $199.99 for adults

June 21-23: For one weekend every summer, Franklin County Fairgrounds hosts a high-energy celebration of music; local food, beer, and wine; handmade crafts; and games and activities for families and children — all topped off with hot-air-balloon launches and a Saturday-evening ‘balloon glow.’ The music is continuous on three stages, with 48 bands slated to perform, headlined by Cake on Friday, Fleet Foxes on Saturday, and Gregory Alan Isakov on Sunday.

 

Hooplandia

Eastern States Exposition and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

www.thebige.com/p/hooplandia

Admission: Free for spectators

June 21-23: For the second straight year, Hooplandia, the Northeast’s biggest 3-on-3 basketball tournament, will be hosted by Eastern States Exposition (ESE) and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. The event takes place on the ESE grounds, with youth championship games held at the Hall of Fame. Seventy-five basketball courts will be set up to accommodate more than 650 games played by approximately 2,100 participants of all ages. Divisions have been created to provide an all-inclusive environment for players of all ages and playing abilities, including young girls, boys, women, men, high-school-level, college-level, OGs, veterans, and more.

 

Municipal Fireworks

Admission: Free

June and July: Western Mass. communities will host numerous fireworks events around the Fourth of July this year. Sites include Look Memorial Park, Northampton, June 22; Holyoke Community College, June 28; Westfield Middle School, June 29; UMass Amherst McGuirk Stadium, July 2; Smith Middle School, South Hadley, July 3; Franklin County Fairgrounds, Greenfield, July 4; Six Flags New England, Agawam, July 4-6; Riverfront Park, Springfield, July 4; and Beacon Field, Greenfield, July 6.

 

Southwick AMA Pro Motocross National

The Wick 338, 46 Powder Mill Road, Southwick

thewick338.com

Admission: $35-$435

June 29: The Southwick National at the Wick 338 is round 5 of the 2024 Lucas Oil Pro Motocross Championship, sanctioned by AMA Pro Racing. Gates open at 7 a.m., and ticket prices span a wide range of viewing opportunities, from general admission to a ‘preferred viewing island’ in the center of the track to multiple VIP locations offering spectacular views, tented seating, a live monitor feed, lunch, and private adult-beverage bars and facilities. 

 

Monson Summerfest

Main Street, Monson

www.monsonsummerfestinc.com

Admission: Free

July 4: In 1979, a group of parishioners from the town’s Methodist church wanted to start an Independence Day celebration focused on family and community, The first Summerfest featured food, games, and fun activities. With the addition of a parade, along with booths, bands, rides, and activities, the event has evolved into an attraction drawing more than 10,000 people every year. This year’s parade steps off at 10 a.m. on Main Street, followed by activities, music, and a beer garden later in the day.

 

Berkshires Arts Festival

380 State Road, Great Barrington

www.americanartmarketing.com

Admission: $14; weekend pass, $16; students, $7; under 10, free

July 5-7: Ski Butternut plays host to the Berkshires Arts Festival, a regional tradition for more than two decades. Thousands of art lovers and collectors are expected to stop by to check out and purchase the creations of 200 jury-selected artists and designers from across the country, in both outdoor and air-conditioned indoor exhibition spaces. The family-friendly event also features demonstrations, food, and live music.

 

Brimfield Outdoor Antiques Show

Route 20, Brimfield

www.brimfieldantiquefleamarket.com

Admission: Free

July 9-14, Sept. 3-8: After expanding steadily through the decades, the Brimfield Antique Show now encompasses six miles of Route 20 and has become a nationally known destination for people to value antiques, collectibles, and flea-market finds. Some 6,000 dealers and close to 1 million total visitors show up at the three annual, week-long events; the first was in May.

 

 

Springfield Jazz and Roots Festival

Stearns Square, Springfield

www.springfieldjazzfest.com

Admission: Free

July 12-13: The annual Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival descends upon Stearns Square and surrounding streets this summer, offering a festive atmosphere featuring locally and internationally acclaimed musical artists. More than 10,000 people are expected to attend. The musical lineup will be announced soon on the website.

 

Glasgow Lands Scottish Festival

300 North Main St., Florence

www.glasgowlands.org

Admission: $5-$28; under 6, free

July 20: Held at Look Memorial Park, this 29th annual festival celebrating all things Scottish features bagpipes, heavy athletics, Celtic dance, drumming, vendors, historical demonstrations, musical guests, children’s events, and much more. Guests can also attend a whiskey-tasting master class ($30) where they can sample and learn the differences and complexities of single-malt scotch whiskey, as well as learning the history of the spirit and how it is made.

 

Springfield Dragon Boat Festival

121 West St., Springfield, MA

www.pvriverfront.org

Admission: Free for spectators

July 20: The seventh annual Springfield Dragon Boat Festival returns to North Riverfront Park. Hosted by the Pioneer Valley Riverfront Club, this family-friendly festival features the exciting sport of dragon-boat racing and will include music, performances, food, vendors, kids’ activities, and more. The festival is an ideal event for businesses and organizations looking for a team-building opportunity, and provides financial support for the Riverfront Club.

 

Brew at the Zoo

The Zoo in Forest Park, Springfield

forestparkzoo.org/brew

Admission: $55-$75; designated drivers, $25-$35

Aug. 3: Brew at The Zoo is a fundraiser at the Zoo in Forest Park, featuring unlimited craft-beer samples from more than 15 local breweries, a home-brew competition, live music, food trucks, games, and, of course, animal interactions. The fundraiser supports the general operating costs of the more than 225 animals that call the zoo home, many of which have been deemed non-releasable by a wildlife rehabilitator for reasons relating to injury, illness, permanent disability, habituation to humans, and other factors.

 

Agricultural Fairs

Admission: Varies; check websites

August and September: As regional fairs go, the Big E (thebige.com), slated for Sept 13-29, is still the region’s main draw, and there’s something for everyone, whether it’s the copious fair food, livestock shows, Avenue of States houses, parades, local vendors and crafters, or live music. But the Big E isn’t the only agricultural fair on the block. The Middlefield Fair (middlefieldfair.org) kicks off the fair season on Aug. 9-11, followed by the Westfield Fair (thewestfieldfair.com) on Aug. 16-18, the Cummington Fair (cummingtonfair.com) on Aug. 22-25; the Three County Fair in Northampton (3countyfair.com) on Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, the Franklin County Fair in Greenfield (fcas.com) on Sept. 5-8, and the Belchertown Fair (belchertownfair.com) on Sept. 20-22, to name some of the larger gatherings.

 

Glendi

22 St. George Road, Springfield

www.stgeorgecath.org/glendi

Admission: Free

Sept. 6-8: Every year, St. George Cathedral offers thousands of visitors the best in traditional Greek foods, pastries, music, dancing, and old-fashioned Greek hospitality. In addition, the festival offers activities for children, tours of the historic St. George Cathedral and Byzantine Chapel, vendors from across the East Coast, icon workshops, movies in the Glendi Theatre, cooking demonstrations, and more.

 

Mattoon Arts Festival

Mattoon Street, Springfield

www.mattoonfestival.org

Admission: Free

Sept. 7-8: Now celebrating its 51st year, the Mattoon Arts Festival is the longest-running arts festival in the Pioneer Valley, featuring about 100 exhibitors, including artists that work in ceramics, fibers, glass, jewelry, painting and printmaking, photography, wood, metal, and mixed media. Food vendors and strolling musicians help to make the event a true late-summer destination.

 

FreshGrass Festival

1040 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams

www.freshgrass.com

Admission: Three-day pass, $64-$169

Sept. 20-22: The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is known for its musical events, and the FreshGrass festival is among the highlights, showcasing dozens of bluegrass artists and bands on four stages over three days. This year, the lineup includes Shakey Graves, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, the Devil Makes Three, Drive-By Truckers, Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda, Antonio Sanchez Trio, Steel Pulse, and more.

 

Old Deerfield Craft Fair

8 Memorial St., Deerfield

www.deerfield-craft.org

Admission: See website

Sep. 21-22: This award-winning show that closes out the summer tourism season has been recognized for its traditional crafts and fine-arts categories and offers a great variety of items, from furniture to pottery. And while in town, check out all of Historic Deerfield, featuring restored, 18th-century museum houses with period furnishings, demonstrations of Colonial-era trades, and a collection of Early American crafts, ceramics, furniture, textiles, and metalwork.

 

The Crisis Might Be Over, but Challenges Remain on the Healthcare Workforce Front

By
Healthcare News Special Coverage

Progress Report

Jason Pacheco doesn’t like using that phrase ‘new normal’ any more than anyone else these days.

It’s more than a little tired, and in most settings, it’s been retired.

But when it comes to the workforce issues facing healthcare providers these days, it ultimately works. Four full years after the height of the pandemic and maybe a decade after some not-so-subtle shifts in the workforce landscape, especially the retirement of Baby Boomers, there is what appears to a new normal, and one that will continue for the foreseeable future.

It’s no longer a crisis, in the true sense of that word, although there are certainly many challenges, said Pacheco, director of Workforce Planning, Analytics, and Compensation for Baystate Health.

He noted that Baystate and other providers are no longer using large numbers of very expensive travel nurses, and there is no longer a sense of desperation over if and how vacancies will be filled. But in this new normal, there are still many open positions at any given time — more than before the pendulum started to swing.

“Baystate has implemented several key training programs … for example, we’ll go out and recruit a cohort of medical assistants. Instead of people having to go to school to become a medical assistant, we’ll hire them, and we’ll pay them to train to become a medical assistant.”

There is also a greater need to be competitive with compensation, benefits, and other perks; added emphasis on retention and the many elements of that equation; many more pay-to-train programs, education-assistance efforts, and other inititiatives to get individuals into healthcare and then provide them with the skills to succeed at one job and then advance to others; greater collaboration with area colleges to train existing employees and help them advance; and an ever-growing need to listen to employees and create an environment they want to be part of.

Dr. Robert Roose says a focus on culture has helped to “reset” the workforce crisis.

Dr. Robert Roose says a focus on culture has helped to “reset” the workforce crisis.

“Baystate has implemented several key training programs … for example, we’ll go out and recruit a cohort of medical assistants. Instead of people having to go to school to become a medical assistant, we’ll hire them, and we’ll pay them to train to become a medical assistant,” said Pacheco, adding that the system is partnering with Holyoke Community College to deliver a medical assistant training course, just one of myriad examples of how providers and systems are being proactive, and getting creative, when it comes to recruiting talent and retaining it.

Dr. Robert Roose, chief administrative officer for the Springfield market of Trinity Health Of New England, overseeing Mercy Medical Center, Johnson Memorial Hospital, and the affiliates of both, said both elements of the equation are equally important.

And as he acknowledged that the workforce crisis in healthcare has eased — or “reset,” he said — there are many reasons for this, including, at Mercy and elsewhere, a healthy emphasis on culture.

“Our colleagues have found that culture is what has ultimately compelled people to come to a system and stay within a system and continue to engage in the wellness professions,” he told BusinessWest. “We’re looking at how we better redesign work to attend to the ways that healthcare delivery has changed and will continue to be changing, and looking at ways to reinforce what matters to people to retain them in our hospitals and healthcare systems, while recruiting more individuals.”

Emily Davis, senior director of Human Resources at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, concurred.

“From a retention standpoint, it comes down to … how do we provide an environment where employees feel not only appreciated, but where, in every position, they can understand and feel the impact they’re having on patient care?

Emily Davis says it’s important for employees to feel they are appreciated — and to feel the impact they have on patient care.

Emily Davis says it’s important for employees to feel they are appreciated — and to feel the impact they have on patient care.

“Also, how does the environment they work in every day contribute positively to not just their livelihood, but their lives?” she went on, adding that providers’ ability to answer those questions in a positive fashion will go a long way toward determining their ability to retain the employees they have worked so hard to attract and invested so much in terms of onboarding and continued training and professional development.

For this issue and its forcus on the healthcare workforce, we’ll get back to those questions, how systems and individual providers are answering them, and how they are looking to make additional progress in living with this new normal.

 

Hire Power

As he talked about the workforce issues still confronting healthcare providers — but also about the progress made on some levels — Pacheco used numbers to help get his points across.

He said the system has been averaging 1,600 to 1,650 job vacancies at any given time, a number that is more than double what the system was averaging (maybe 700 to 800 vacancies) before the pandemic, but a significant improvement over the more than 2,000 vacancies at the height of COVID.

Meanwhile, more than 600 individuals are currently in the onboarding process at Baystate, including more than 200 nurses, many of them recent graduates of area colleges, he said, adding that these numbers are one indication of the system’s ability to bring more individuals into postitions, an improvement over a few years ago.

“We’re looking at how we better redesign work to attend to the ways that healthcare delivery has changed and will continue to be changing, and looking at ways to reinforce what matters to people to retain them in our hospitals and healthcare systems, while recruiting more individuals.”

“We are making significant progress in terms of bringing people in,” he said. “For example, we’ve implemented a number of new training programs — we’re training medical assistants, patient care technicians, and our newest one is a sterile process technician; we’re teaching folks how to clean and work with surgical instrumentation. However, all of that requires a significant investment in orienting people.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to retention, while there has been some progress in bringing those vacancy numbers down, “we have not yet returned to a normal place, like what we experiencing pre-pandemic, for turnover levels,” said Pacheco, adding that the system is averaging roughly 19% turnover, with much of it coming in the first year of employment.

Michele Anstett

Michele Anstett says competition for workers in the home-care arena is fierce, and there is little loyalty to employers.

“So, are we making headway in terms of bringing people into healthcare? Absolutely,” he went on. “Do we still have a long way to go? You bet.”

Roose agreed, adding that, at both Mercy and Johnson Memorial, there has been recorded progress in both hiring and retention, with a roughly 40% reduction in turnover the past two years — 50% at Johnson Memorial and 35% at Mercy.

“Reducing those that are leaving the organization to levels that are under 20% has been very stabilizing,” he said. “And while reducing turnover, we’ve also, over the past several months, seen that the number of people coming into Mercy and Johnson Memorial has outpaced the number of those leaving, so the balance has shifted.”

This is true across many professions, especially nursing, where there has been reduced turnover and improved recruitment, he said, adding that other realms, such as transport, food and nutrition, and others, have recorded less progress.

Indeed, while things have stabilized somewhat, building and maintaining a workforce remains quite challenging for most healthcare providers.

Michele Anstett, president of the West Springfield-based home-care provider Visiting Angels, said conditions have improved somewhat since the height of COVID, when people were afraid to enter others’ homes. But competition for workers is intense, and the biggest problem is retention.

Indeed, there is comparatively little loyalty to employers, she said, adding that workers will often chase an additional dollar an hour in wages or some other benefit. She stays ahead of the game, if can be called that, first by “hiring, hiring, hiring,” as she put it, and then taking steps to try to hang on to some of those she brings in.

“People tend to fly more; because of the economy, because of society and everything being on the move, and people being really strapped, they go where they can best provide for their family,” she said. “So I’m going to hire faster than they go; I’m hiring about five a week. How many go a week? Maybe two. That’s how we’re adjusting to this new reality.”

“For a mom in the workforce, the most important thing is her family and making sure she can get them to doctors’ appointments, she can get to school functions, she can make sure that if they’re sick, they’re taken care of without repurcussions from the employer. And those are things that we find are intangible and so important to our workforce, so we do our best to make sure that their family needs are met.”

When it comes to retention, Anstett says she has what she calls a magic formula — a focus on the work-culture factor.

“It’s about how they’re treated, how we respect them, how all those different qualities that they find in an employer make them want to say,” she said, adding that working in such an environment often weighs more heavily with employees than an additional dollar an hour.

“About 95% of our employees are women, and I would say 80% of those women are moms with dependent children,” she went on. “For a mom in the workforce, the most important thing is her family and making sure she can get them to doctors’ appointments, she can get to school functions, she can make sure that if they’re sick, they’re taken care of without repurcussions from the employer. And those are things that we find are intangible and so important to our workforce, so we do our best to make sure that their family needs are met.”

 

Staying Power

Addressing the broad subject of retention, those we spoke with said there is strong need for being creative and showing employees at all levels that they are valued and part of something larger than their own job.

And it all starts with listening, Davis said. “A lot of it is really paying attention to our workforce — what they’re telling us, but also what we’re learning from paying attention to them, not only in their words, but what we see them struggle with and what we see them strive in doing.”

Another key to retention is effective recruitment, she said, attracting people who understand — and value — the environment they’ll be working in and the team they will be joining, and want to be part of all that.

“The key to successful recruiting is agility,” Davis said. “It’s changing our strategies as we see what’s happening outside our walls, what’s happening in our area from the standpoint of where we have people that we can attract, and how we attract them.

“What we’ve been doing recently is getting back into what I call the ‘milk and cookies’ of in-person recruitment,” she went on. “We’ll have a team of talent-acquisition partners, along with leaders, and have a day when people can come in for a given position. They can fill out the application, they can interview with the talent-acquisition partner, interview with the manager, and have a decision about their hiring right on the spot. And then they can meet with the onboarding coordinator. So before they even leave the building, they have an answer, and they’ve started on their journey.”

Elaborating, she said this strategy was recently deployed for the successful hiring of several environmental-services personnel, but it can be used — and has been — for other positions as well, including nurses.

Another key element in the equation is compensation, said all those we spoke with, adding that systems and individual providers must continue making the investments needed to remain competitive — to the extent they can, given the hard reality that reimbursement rates for care provided by those facilities continue to lag far behind the cost of providing that care.

Davis agreed, but said providers who want to retain talent have to go beyond compensation. And this brings her back to that notion of making employees at all levels feel valued.

“Compensation matters,” she said. “But what matters when you get your foot in the door is … how do I feel about the place that I work at? Am I valued? Am I making a difference? Am I treated well? Do I feel like I belong?”

There are many factors that go into how employees will answer those questions, she went on, listing everything from wages and benefits to flexibility in schedules to the willingness of leadership to listen to employees and repond to what they are hearing.

At Cooley Dickinson, there are surveys, said Davis, but the more important strategy is the rounding conducted by members of the leadership team and the visbility of those leaders.

“The staff needs to understand that there is someone there that they can check in with, someone that will get back to me, whether it’s an answer I want or an answer that I wish was different,” she said, adding that rounding, an ever-evolving practice that takes place on many different levels, is key to all-important visbility as well as the listening process.

Roose agreed, noting that Mercy and Johnson Memorial have placed additional emphasis on listening and responding to what is heard through initiatives such as a ‘new-colleague culture experience,’ to start later this month.

“We’ll provide every new colleague that enters our organization with an opportunity to really focus on what about the culture they do identify with and how we can best attend to that during the early period of their orientation and work with us,” he explained. “We find that most people who are going to leave the organization leave within the first year, and a lot of that has to do with expectations around work and whether they’re able to connect with what brought them there.”

 

Bottom Line

But there are other strategies as well, including educational assistance that will help existing employees seize other career opportunities.

At Baystate, the system has essentially doubled the amount allowable per year for tuition assistance, said Pacheco, adding that the new ceilings went into effect in January, and the investment (probably an additional $300,000 to $400,000) is already showing signs of paying off.

“We have people studying to become nurses, we have folks working on various lab occupations … it varies,” he said. “As long as there is a connection to the healthcare system, we’ll support them with educational assistance.”

Returning to the subject of pay-to-train initiatives, Pacheco said that, in addition to the program for medical assistants, there are others for patient-care technicians (another partnership with Holyoke Community College) and other positions, as well as apprenticeship programs, including one that trains individuals to read heart monitors.

All these initiatives are part of a broad response to a new reality — yes, a new normal — one that should prevail, and test healthcare providers across the board, for the foreseeable future.

HVAC Field Continues to Evolve with the Times

By
Professor William Halloran teaches HVAC students at STCC.
Building Trades Special Coverage

Energy for Change

Professor William Halloran teaches HVAC students at STCC.

Professor William Halloran teaches HVAC students at STCC.

Dr. Fahad Khan said the HVAC program at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) has been around since the 1960s.

“Many in the field around here went to STCC at some point,” said Khan, a professor in the college’s Engineering department. “It’s a legacy program.”

It’s also a program that has seen plenty of change and evolution over the years — which has only accelerated in the past decade or so.

Take, for example, an associate degree added in 2019 that focuses on building automation and control systems. Or advances in fuel, such as the emergence of biodiesel.

“Things have evolved a lot since the 1970s; boilers have improved in efficiency,” Khan said. “We still have to use combustion; some people hope that, in the next 10 years, we won’t need to use combustion for heat, but that’s probably too optimistic.”

But changes are already emerging, said Scott Cernak, owner of Western Mass Heating, Cooling & Plumbing in Haydenville.

“The big change in the past few years is the initiative to convert people from fossil fuels to heat-pump technology, or anything electric-driven.”

“The big change in the past few years is the initiative to convert people from fossil fuels to heat-pump technology, or anything electric-driven,” Cernak said, citing a broad push among government leaders in Massachusetts to move toward decarbonization through climate-technology investments and programs like Mass Save.

“People who have the money and care about the environment enough to do it are going to heat pumps — whole-house conversions, partial conversions, a lot of it driven by Mass Save rebates and tax incentives as well. It’s been about a decade-long push, but especially strong over the last two to three years.”

A heat-pump conversion can cost to to three times more up front than replacing one fossil-fuel system with another, he noted, which is why those rebates and incentives are so critical. And the Mass Save program recently committed to a three-year plan in which rebates will not decrease.

“There’s been a lot of training for our sales and estimation staff, manufacturer trainings, climate-initiative trainings from Mass Save,” Cernak added.

In addition, “it’s been a different mindset for people heating their homes. With fossil fuels, it’s very easy to make heat, it’s very efficient, and people feel that warmth right away. Heat pumps are different. You’re harnessing electricity through the heat-pump system, and the heat isn’t as profound as the fossil-fuel heat. So there’s a level of adjustment for the homeowner. And you also need to make sure the house has good-enough infrastructure to support it.”

Scott Cernak

Scott Cernak says a focus on indoor air quality and a move away from carbonization (in the case of heat pumps) are two major ongoing trends in the HVAC world.

While heat pumps have replaced carbon fuels in many residential and commercial systems, Khan said, the efficiency remains a work in progress.

“They have improved in terms of coefficient of performance, with how much heat you can extract from the outside to the inside. That varies depending on the temperature outside,” he added, explaining that, at very low temperatures, heating costs can rise dramatically. “With heat pumps, you can end up paying a lot of money between December and February.”

One way to combat that, he added, is with water-to-air geothermal heat-pump systems that draw on the stable temperature of the earth’s ground or water sources to provide efficient heating and cooling.

The other big shift in the HVAC world in recent years has been an emphasis on indoor air quality, which was certainly accelerated during the COVID years, but had taken root even before then, Cernak said.

“Indoor air quality has become a focal point in our business as well. A lot of people with allergies and sensitivities have embraced air scrubbers or electronic air cleaners because of all the ancillary benefits. They do kill bacteria and viruses, such as coronavirus. It won’t prevent you from getting sick out in the wild, but it can help you in your own home.”

“These guys are not going to be outsourced anytime soon. You’re not going to see a robot come into the house; somebody has to do the work. An engineer can be outsourced, but who’s going to install and cut metal and lay down the ductwork and do the wiring? Somebody has to do it.”

While technologies continue to advance, Khan said, the state is also focusing on incentives for weatherizing houses, making them more efficient in terms of heat loss and gain. “We’ll still rely on combustion, at least for the next 10 years.”

 

Priming the Pipeline

With business split about 75% residential and 25% commercial and industrial, Western Mass Heating, Cooling & Plumbing handles all aspects of that name, from installation and retrofitting to new construction and service, Cernak said. “We’ve had a steady incline since our inception in 2020 — we’ve tripled our sales and doubled our workforce.”

That employee growth is impressive in itself, at a time when all building trades are struggling with retention as retirements outpace new talent in the pipeline.

“We’ve seen challenges, especially at first. But we have a strong training program,” Cernak said. “It’s been relatively easy to hire young talent coming up from the trades. They’re not ready to run their own jobs yet, so we’re training them extensively to bring them up into our workforce. The growth has to come from within.

“For a young kid coming out of high school or college, bringing them up to speed usually takes one to three years, depending on the position,” he explained, adding that internal training has been very effective in bolstering his workforce.

Fahad Khan

Fahad Khan says STCC is equipping students to take the first steps into an HVAC field that needs young talent.

Cernak said the question of whether to go to a four-year college or enter a training program in the trades is one each young person needs to make based on their interests and needs.

“But what I can offer is, we pay for training, and you start making money immediately. Even in an internship, you’re making a livable wage, and then there are frequent increases, good benefits, and it’s satisfying at the end of the day, knowing that, by providing heating or cooling or plumbing, you’re providing comfort, safety, and efficiency in someone’s home.”

Khan also recognizes the need to bring more young talent into the world of HVAC.

“There is a vacuum in this field, as a lot of folks are retiring, or have taken early retirement since COVID. We’re trying to fill the gap.”

While STCC also offers a two-year degree program in HVAC, he explained, the one-year certificate program starts with the basics, and “by the time you finish, you’ve gotten your feet wet. You’ll still require some in-field training; you’re not going to hit the road and start fixing stuff. You’ll want to shadow somebody. But we have a lot of success covering all the bases, so, by the end of the year, you can start training in an internship.”

It helps, he said, that the state offers funding for businesses to take on interns for six months.

“It helps the employer, so they don’t have to carry the burden of training somebody and paying them, and it also helps the students with training hours, and gives them a chance to see if they really want to do it or not.”

Many do, of course, and the pay is a factor; HVAC professionals can make $55,000 after a year, or up to $75,000 or more if they go into automation and control, Khan said.

“These guys are not going to be outsourced anytime soon. You’re not going to see a robot come into the house; somebody has to do the work. An engineer can be outsourced, but who’s going to install and cut metal and lay down the ductwork and do the wiring? Somebody has to do it.

“So it’s a good area to be in, with a lot of job security, and it’s not going anywhere soon,” he added. “We can diagnose things faster, make things more efficient, but in the end, somebody’s got to go into the house for the actual repair.”

 

Changing Environment

The statewide push toward climate and energy innovation aren’t slowing down, and will continue to impact the worlds of construction and HVAC.

In a speech last month to the New England Council, Gov. Maura Healey cited figures from a UMass Donahue Institute report suggesting that the $1.3 billion her administration wants to invest in climate technology over 10 years would result in $16.4 billion in new economic activity and as many as 7,000 new jobs.

The state spending figure includes $400 million in bond authorizations for capital projects, $300 million in tax incentives, and $300 million to support the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s operations, as well as an expansion in eligibility for existing offshore wind tax credits that could cost up to $350 million.

At the same time, the Center for EcoTechnology in Florence — which has been at the forefront of innovation when it comes to energy efficiency and climate impacts for almost a half-century — expects to dramatically expand its work, President and CEO Ashley Muspratt recently told BusinessWest.

“The work we do ultimately rolls up to reducing carbon emissions and shepherding in all of the benefits that come with that,” she said. “Carbon reduction can allow for a better lifestyle in terms of cost savings, health benefits, energy independence, and a more comfortable, better livelihood. We could be tackling this crisis while also paving the way to a better way of life.”

And where there’s a will, innovation will follow.

“The technology is advancing tremendously. It has been forever, but especially the past few years. And that trajectory will probably continue as manufacturers learn new technologies to heat and cool homes efficiently,” Cernak said. “The next change is a new refrigerant which is more environmentally friendly and has a wider range of capability. By 2025, every manufacturer will be affected by that.

“It’s ever-moving,” he added. “We have administrative staff people who are always keeping up with regulations and changes and Mass Save incentives and tax incentives and manufacturer trainings. There are a lot of moving parts, but it all makes it better for the consumer.”

Baystate, MassMutual Collaborate on New Community Health Center

By
Baystate, MassMutual Collaborate on New Community Health Center
Insurance Special Coverage

A Powerful Partnership

Baystate, MassMutual Collaborate on New Community Health Center

From left: LaMar Cook and Kristen Elechko from Gov. Maura Healey’s Western Mass. office; Roger Crandall, chairman, president, and CEO of MassMutual; Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno; U.S. Rep. Richard Neal; Baystate Health trustee Denise Jordan, executive director of the Springfield Housing Authority; Baystate Health President and CEO Dr. Mark Keroack; and Harriet DeVerry, chair of the Baystate Health board of trustees.

 

On May 21, in an effort to improve health equity and meet the growing needs of the Springfield community, Baystate Health announced a plan to build a comprehensive community health center in the heart of the city, made possible by the support of its longstanding partner, MassMutual.

MassMutual is donating approximately 10 acres of land valued at an estimated $5 million in the southeast corner of its Springfield campus, as well as providing financing and other support for the project. In addition, the MassMutual Foundation is donating $5 million over five years to support the new, state-of-the-art health center that will be owned and operated by Baystate Health. The expected total cost for the project is $45 million to $50 million.

The proposed 90,000-square-foot community health center, which will be accessible at the intersection of Wilbraham Road and Alden Street, will centralize services, creating a medical neighborhood caring for children, families, and adults and providing comprehensive primary care, integrated behavioral health, and ancillary services for the Greater Springfield area. The new center will have greater access by public transportation, ample free parking, and easy access from major thoroughfares.

Prior to conveyance to the Baystate Health Foundation, MassMutual will clear the site of the existing buildings, and the lot will be subdivided into its own parcel, separate from MassMutual’s headquarters. Construction is expected to begin sometime in 2025 and be completed in 2027.

“Thanks to the generous donations and substantial support provided by MassMutual and the MassMutual Foundation, Baystate Health’s vision to create a comprehensive, integrated community health and wellness center to serve the most vulnerable populations in Greater Springfield can advance toward realization.”

“Thanks to the generous donations and substantial support provided by MassMutual and the MassMutual Foundation, Baystate Health’s vision to create a comprehensive, integrated community health and wellness center to serve the most vulnerable populations in Greater Springfield can advance toward realization,” Baystate Health President and CEO Dr. Mark Keroack said.

With the new community health center and wellness hub in place, Baystate Health will consolidate services from four of its existing Springfield health centers to the new building, where they will continue to provide services, plus more, for adult and pediatric patients at the new location. These centers will remain open and fully functional until their services can be transitioned to the new health center, and Baystate Health is committed to engaging the community and local leaders during the planning phase of the project.

The centers and their services that will be transitioned to the future Wilbraham Road location include Mason Square Neighborhood Health Center, Baystate High Street Health Center, Baystate High Street Pediatrics, and Wesson Women’s Clinic.

Roger Crandall

Roger Crandall says MassMutual and Baystate Health have long been committed to each other’s success.

These existing community-based facilities are limited in size and scope with many infrastructure challenges that require significant upgrading and capital investment to allow for growth and expansion of services. The new center will provide Baystate Health with a state-of-the-art, modern facility to provide robust care for patients as well as attract top providers.

“We intend to co-locate four of our existing Springfield community health centers into a larger, modern facility to create this unified healthcare delivery wellness hub,” Keroack said. “Several convergent factors have informed our vision. The positive outcomes we have demonstrated in our Medicaid accountable care organization, involving more than 50,000 of the region’s most underserved patients, have provided value to this population, improved health, and allowed us to begin to address health disparities and inequities. We could not do this without the generosity of MassMutual and the MassMutual Foundation.”

In addition to MassMutual’s support, the project will also benefit from some expected state and federal grants. The land that will be donated to Baystate Health represents roughly 10% of MassMutual’s approximately 100-acre Springfield campus. The company’s move toward digitization and bringing its employees together in its iconic main office building on State Street has left a portion of its property underutilized, including two vacant buildings. Rather than leave this space unused, the company wanted to find a better, more long-term meaningful use for the land, one that would serve the community MassMutual has called home since 1851.

“Throughout our long histories in Springfield, both MassMutual and Baystate have had an enduring commitment to each other’s success as we’ve worked toward our own respective, yet similar pursuits, helping people live better, more fulfilling lives,” said Roger Crandall, chairman, president, and CEO of MassMutual. “We are incredibly proud that a portion of our property will serve a more meaningful purpose and a greater good, expanding access to high-quality medical care to improve the health and well-being of our community for generations to come.”

“We are incredibly proud that a portion of our property will serve a more meaningful purpose and a greater good, expanding access to high-quality medical care to improve the health and well-being of our community for generations to come.”

Combined, the four existing community health centers planned for the move currently serve 125,000 patient visits annually. In the envisioned community health center campus on the land to be donated by MassMutual, Baystate Health expects patient visits to increase to 145,000 annually by 2028.

As two of the area’s largest organizations, MassMutual and Baystate Health have come together to support the Springfield community before. A few examples include:

• Baystate Health’s role in the MassMutual Foundation’s work in the North End of Springfield focused on bringing together residents, service providers, community leaders, and other stakeholders to identify and prioritize removal of barriers to community financial well-being for the neighborhood’s residents;

• MassMutual and Baystate Health’s support of the Alliance for Digital Equity, a regional coalition of community-focused organizations working toward digital equity for all people;

• MassMutual’s $3 million donation to help Baystate Health fund its Hospital of the Future expansion; and

• MassMutual’s donation of medical supplies to Baystate Health and redeployment of Springfield-based health professionals working in MassMutual’s Wellness Center to serve broader community needs in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Two titans of their industries once again come together for the betterment of our Springfield community to continue to proactively facilitate good health outcomes, especially when dealing with mental-health situations,” Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno said of the community health center, the organizations’ newest collaboration. “My administration was proud to support this health initiative with nearly $1 million in ARPA funding.”

Hadley Is on the Road (Route 9, That Is) to Progress

By
Molly Keegan
Community Spotlight

Community Spotlight

Molly Keegan

Molly Keegan says the Route 9 project is just one of many ongoing issues in Hadley.

 

There is no official countdown clock on the massive project to widen and reconstruct roughly 2.5 miles of Route 9 in Hadley.

But there might as well be.

Indeed, many business owners and residents alike are counting down the months, weeks, and days until this important undertaking, launched in 2021, is in the books; April 2026 is the projected date. Everyone agrees that, when finished, the project will be well worth the trouble and inconvenience it is creating. But getting there … well, that is an ongoing challenge and topic of frustration for many.

“Yes, it’s a disruption, especially for some of the businesses along Route 9 that have had more disruption to date than others,” said Molly Keegan, a principal with Curran & Keegan Financial, a Select Board member in town and one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Hadley Business Council. “But, ultimately, I think it’s really going to serve the business community well once it’s completed.”

The Route 9 project is one of many ongoing issues in this community of just over 5,000 people, said Keegan and Town Administrator Carolyn Brennan. Others include a growing need for a full-time planner, the advancement of plans for a new Department of Public Works facility, and ongoing work to maintain the town’s dikes, a costly but necessary initiative.

But it’s a housing problem — which mirrors what’s happening in many other communities but is perhaps more acute because of the surging cost of real estate in Hadley — that has perhaps taken center stage, Brennan said.

“Ultimately, I think it’s really going to serve the business community well once it’s completed.”

As in many other communities, she noted, a shortage of affordable housing is certainly impacting seniors and young families. The former want to stay in town but don’t have any place to go except the large homes they no longer want or need, and the latter are finding it increasingly difficult to come to Hadley because there is very little that they can afford.

“If you do any search on housing in Hadley, at any given time, there’s maybe five or six houses, and they’re extremely expensive,” Brennan said. “There are a lot of parents who have raised their kids here — and those kids can’t afford to raise their own children here.”

Keegan agreed. “It’s very difficult for people on either end of the spectrum to buy in,” she said. “If you look right now and see what’s for sale in Hadley, you’ll find houses for $900,000 to $1 million. Young people looking to start a family are not going to be able to afford that.”

For this, the latest installment of its Community Spotlight series, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at Hadley, a community known for its asparagus, but also a lively, diverse business community that continues to take advantage of the town’s unique spot on the map.

 

Location, Location, Location

As she relayed the story of how Curran & Keegan relocated from Northampton to Middle Street in Hadley, in the center of town, in 2021, Keegan explained, rather succinctly and effectively, why this community has become such a popular mailing address for businesses of all kinds.

In short, it’s that oldest and most absolute of commercial real-estate values: location, location, location, in this case between two college towns and two of the most popular destinations in the region — Amherst and Northampton — a spot that has made Hadley a destination itself.

Carolyn Brennan

“If you do any search on housing in Hadley, at any given time, there’s maybe five or six houses, and they’re extremely expensive. There are a lot of parents who have raised their kids here — and those kids can’t afford to raise their own children here.”

“We had been renting and were looking for a property to purchase,” she explained. “This particular property we’re in had been a residential property, but given its proximity to Route 9, it happened to be zoned commercial. We fell in love with it; it’s a wonderful location for our clients on both sides of the river, and also those coming down from Franklin County. We’re in the perfect spot at the crossroads of Route 47 and Route 9.”

Business owners in virtually every sector can say essentially the same thing, which is why Hadley, and especially that Route 9 corridor, is home to everything from hotels and restaurants to big-box retail stores; from car dealerships to cannabis dispensaries; from tech companies to the world headquarters for V-One Vodka.

All or most of them are taking full advantage of the 100,000 or so cars that pass along Route 9 every day, although there are certainly fewer these days as the construction project continues and many bypass the thoroughfare — if they can. And those that are on it are moving more slowly because of that work.

Hadley at a glance

Year Incorporated: 1661
Population: 5,325
Area: 24.6 square miles
County: Hampshire
Residential Tax Rate: $11.39
Commercial Tax Rate: $11.39
Median Household Income: $51,851
Median Family Income: $61,897
Type of Government: Open Town Meeting, Board of Selectmen
Largest Employers: Super Stop & Shop; Evaluation Systems Group Pearson; Elaine Center at Hadley; Home Depot; Lowe’s Home Improvement
* Latest information available

But, by and large, businesses along the road are getting by, said Keegan, adding that project was one of the motivations for creation of the Hadley Business Council, and it has certainly become a priority for the agency, which meets on the last Friday of each month.

The council has helped generate ongoing communication among the business community, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and Baltazar Contractors, the general contractor handling the Route 9 project, which has in some ways eased the disruption.

“They recognize the negative impact on businesses, and they’ve been doing everything they can to make sure that there’s signage to indicate that businesses are still open and that they’re not blocking people from entering those businesses,” Keegan said. “So we’ve established a good working relationship.

“That said, there has been an impact on certain businesses,” she said, listing ventures ranging from Hillside Pizza to Wanczyk Nurseries to Exotic Auto, which had to be relocated to another spot on Route 9 because of the project.

As noted, the road work is one of the main focal points at present for the business council, which was formed, she explained, to improve communication between the town and its business community — “in both directions.”

One of the council’s priorities is educational opportunities, she said, adding that the town’s building inspector has appeared before the group to talk about the permitting process. Meanwhile, the council serves as a voice for the business community if it wants to bring something to the attention of town leaders, such as the need for specific bylaws and zoning on food trucks.

“I think we’ve done remarkably well for a long time, but there is so much out there in terms of grant opportunities, especially around housing — the state is really promoting housing construction — and it’s difficult to take advantage of those opportunities when you don’t have someone focused on it on a full-time basis.”

One of the issues moving forward is a heavy reliance on volunteer board members, said Keegan, adding that, for some time, the town has looked at hiring a full-time planner but hasn’t been able to fit such a position into the budget. Money remains tight, but the need for a planner continues to grow, she told BusinessWest.

“I think we’ve done remarkably well for a long time, but there is so much out there in terms of grant opportunities, especially around housing — the state is really promoting housing construction — and it’s difficult to take advantage of those opportunities when you don’t have someone focused on it on a full-time basis,” she explained. “So that’s something we will continue to take a look at; ultimately, a position that like that will pay for itself over time.”

 

Housing, Housing, Housing

As she talked about Hadley’s housing challenges, Brennan referenced a recent project undertaken by students in the architecture and landscape architecture programs at UMass Amherst.

As part of a studio course, the students were asked to develop potential plans for re-envisioning the Hampshire Mall, a 33-acre property on Route 9 that, like many malls, has suffered from the growing popularity of online shopping and other sea changes in retail and has lost of many businesses.

The course, “Reimagining the Hampshire Mall: Exploring Opportunities for Intergenerational Housing and Community Development,” yielded a proposal to convert the space into 40 rowhouses and 150 apartments with recreational areas.

“It was really fascinating; we sat and listened to the students, who showed us the design and engineering of what the mall could look like by bringing housing and commercial together, and that was very interesting,” said Brennan, noting that the audience included many from the business community and Hadley’s Economic Development Committee, as well as representatives of the mall. “There is definitely some potential for something like this in Hadley.”

While she acknowledged that this was a course project and such an initiative is a long way from reality, Brennan said it will require some real imagination and, most likely, creative reuse of properties like the mall to ease the town’s housing shortage.

“It was a good visual for people on those committees to see what the opportunities are in Hadley,” she said, adding that, like other cities and towns in the region, Hadley is finding it challenging to interest the development community in affordable-housing initiatives, which is the type of project most needed at the moment.

Indeed, Keegan noted that the town’s senior population continues to grow each year, and there is a huge shortage of housing for that constituency.

She offered hope that town officials might be able to take advantage of state Chapter 40R, which encourages the creation of dense residential or mixed-use smart-growth zoning districts, including a high percentage of affordable-housing units, to ease the crunch.

“40R could go a long way toward helping us increase the housing stock,” she said. “But like anything, whatever changes are made are done thoughtfully and over some period of time.”

Housing is one option being considered for the iconic, 129-year-old Russell School, said Brennan, noting that the landmark has been vacant since 2015. A reuse study has identified several alternatives, including keeping the property as a municipal building and renovating it and creating a public-private partnership, she noted.

“The study is going to determine what the market might be for various uses and what it would cost to renovate the Russell School,” she said, adding that housing is certainly a consideration. “We’re hoping that we’re going to get some options to put in front of the voters to see how they would like to proceed with the school.”

Community Bank to Expand Its Presence in Springfield

By
Community Bank’s branch inside Tower Square
Banking and Financial Services

Doubling Down

Community Bank’s branch inside Tower Square

Community Bank’s branch inside Tower Square will be complemented later this year by a second Springfield location on Boston Road.

 

 

 

When Community Bank expanded in 2017 with the acquisition of Merchants Bank, it gained a large network of branches in Vermont … and one in Massachusetts.

That office is located in Tower Square in downtown Springfield and had been NUVO Bank before hanging the Merchants banner. Located far from any other Community location — the organization has a strong presence in Pennsylvania and New York as well as its newer footprint in Vermont — it wouldn’t have been surprising had Community shed it altogether. But the bank saw value in a Springfield presence.

And now, seven years later, it’s doubling down, planning to open a second Springfield location on Boston Road later this year.

“It’s a market that’s not too far from Albany, but far enough where it’s a very distinct market by itself. And because it’s one branch, it’s been a little bit under the radar,” President and CEO Dimitar Karaivanov said. “But it’s a good market with good opportunities, and we have a really good team in the market, and the level of energy and activity in Springfield has been very hot.

“So almost a year ago, we decided we hadn’t given Springfield its rightful chance to succeed,” he went on. “We’re just one branch and have a good team, but we’re somewhat limited by the fact that it’s only one branch downtown. So we decided to kind of invest in the team and the opportunities that we have in the market, and we’re going to double our presence.”

The bank is doing so, he said, in locations that make strategic sense, and also, in some cases, investing in lower-income areas. “We’re looking at communities that offer opportunity from an economic perspective, but we also consider it our responsibility to invest in communities and bring them along in terms of growth. That’s how we’ve been selecting some areas that we’re going into.”

While Greater Springfield has been called overbanked, Karaivanov said Community Bank sees plenty of potential in expanding.

“We’re just one branch and have a good team, but we’re somewhat limited by the fact that it’s only one branch downtown. So we decided to kind of invest in the team and the opportunities that we have in the market, and we’re going to double our presence.”

“There’s no lack of competition in Springfield — there are a lot of banks, a lot of mutuals, a lot of credit unions,” he said. “But the reason that we feel like we can be successful is our team. So we’re really investing in our team. That’s how we look at expansion; it’s really people-based. Obviously, the market needs to be sizable enough for another entrant, but we feel like we’ve got a team that we have basically under-leveraged over the past several years. And now we’re trying to give them more runway and opportunity to be successful.”

 

Branching Out

As Community Bank expands in Springfield and other markets, it’s doing so, the organization explains, by reimagining the in-branch experience with clean, modern designs that encourage customer and banker collaboration, local community tie-ins, and staff that can handle a wide array of financial needs.

“Branches are still pretty important, and I think they will continue to be important,” Karaivanov said. “If you look at where most accounts, especially new accounts, are opened, it is still predominantly in the branch. People still get their mortgages predominantly in the branch. That initial contact with a financial institution is mostly in the branch.

“Now, when you open your second account, or if you are already a customer of a bank, you might go online to apply for a mortgage and other things. But to get into the ecosystem, usually the average person still starts in the branch.”

He cited the example of JPMorgan Chase launching an online-only bank six years ago, “and no one’s heard of it since,” he noted. “Instead, you’re seeing JPMorgan open branches all over the place. It’s hard to be just online. You need both parts.”

To that end, modern branch designs are different than the old, traditional model of counters and lines, he added.

“Today, the branch is really more advisory and consultative than transaction-based because transactions are easy to do on your phone, and you don’t need to go into the branch for a specific transaction anymore. But people do go to the branch for advice and for questions and when they have a problem. So spaces in the branch are designed in a much different way.”

Dimitar Karaivanov

Dimitar Karaivanov

“Transactions are easy to do on your phone, and you don’t need to go into the branch for a specific transaction anymore. But people do go to the branch for advice and for questions and when they have a problem.”

Community Bank currently boasts 28 branches in New England, all but one of them in Vermont, and its current expansion plans include the first New Hampshire branch in addition to the second Springfield location.

“Community Bank is not just expanding, but deepening our roots in New England,” said Matthew Durkee, regional president for New England. “Our branches are the cornerstone of our retail business, and each one allows us to support the community and deepen our relationships with our customers as we partner together throughout their financial journey.”

Those community relationships involve philanthropy and volunteerism in communities where the bank has a presence, Karaivanov added.

“We do a lot of that, led by our branch staff most of the time,” he told BusinessWest. “It’s in our name, right? So we live by it. Our people are involved, they’re on boards, they’re in the Rotary Clubs, they know their neighbors, they’re supporting the local schools, teams, and everything else. It’s how we distinguish ourselves. Those are our neighbors, they’re our friends, and being part of the community is just as important as being a financial institution.”

With its commitment to Springfield affirmed, he added that Community Bank could look to expand further in Massachusetts where it makes sense.

“Hopefully, as we are successful in this expansion, we would like to do more. I’m a big believer in getting behind your success. So if we continue to be successful in Springfield, we’re going to continue to grow.

“Again, this has been a little bit of an outpost for us. Meanwhile, the team’s been doing a great job. And now is the time for us to empower them to do even more.”

 

One-stop Shop

Earlier this month, Community Bank System Inc. — which encompasses four key businesses: banking, benefits administration, insurance, and wealth management — changed its name to Community Financial System Inc. to better reflect the company’s reach.

“The new name allows us to emphasize the evolution of our capabilities, solutions, and focus,” Karaivanov said. “In aggregate, over 39% of our revenue is comprised of diversified fee-income businesses, well over twice that of industry peers. Bringing all of that under the new name, Community Financial System, underscores our mission and drives our inclusiveness as one company.”

It’s a different model, he said, than financial-services organizations in which banking is 90% of the pie.

“We’re a bit of a unicorn because we have four different businesses, and the way we run the company, the bank is our largest business, but it’s not the whole business. With our benefits business, we help people with their 401(k) plans; we administer those all over the country. Or, if you’re an individual and you’re coming for a mortgage from us, we can directly give you a quote for the homeowners’ insurance as well.”

Meanwhile “if you have amounts in your banking accounts that clearly can be invested in better outcomes for you, we’ve got the wealth-management side of the house, or the trust capability. And on the commercial side, especially for small to mid-sized businesses, we can provide everything from capital to insurance to managing their benefit plans, actually helping them with HR consulting.

“It gives us a real leg up when we talk to customers because we’re not just a one-widget shop,” Karaivanov added. “We can provide comprehensive solutions.”

Vanished Valley Brewing Rolls with the Punches

By
From left, Vanished Valley principals Joshua Britton, Michael Rodrigues, and Manny Vital
Restaurants

Yes They Can

 

From left, Vanished Valley principals Joshua Britton, Michael Rodrigues, and Manny Vital

From left, Vanished Valley principals Joshua Britton, Michael Rodrigues, and Manny Vital.

 

Josh Britton remembers the early, heady days of Vanished Valley Brewing Co. — and the challenging ones that followed.

He had started brewing beer in his garage around 2015 when he met Michael Rodrigues, owner of Europa Black Rock Bar & Grille in Ludlow, and Manny Vital, who owned Europa’s building on Route 21. Vital retrofitted a building out back that became the first Vanished Valley brewery; the name was chosen to honor the drowned Quabbin Reservoir towns of Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott.

“We started that process in 2016, but the licensure took nine months for approvals at the state level. Then we started hammering it out in 2017,” Britton said. Within a year or two, the brewery was rated third-best in Massachusetts by BeerAdvocate.

“We had lines out the door,” he added. “We were only producing like 10 barrels at a time, which for that space is a lot of barrelage; it’s pretty tight in there. We were selling cans in a tent next to the building and doing well. And we were fueling Europa with our kegs. We had people show up and ask, ‘oh, where’s your taproom?’ And they found out it was just a small, 20-by-20 space.”

Rodrigues decided to retire the Europa brand early in 2019 when he saw an opportunity to expand Vanished Valley with expanded production space and a food operation, and the three principals started gutting and updating the building, and also putting up an addition.

“Mike stayed up nights smoking meat — night after night after night, just to meet demand. So we were delivering barbecue and beer to door to door, and it stuck.”

“We wanted to add the food element in a bigger retail space, so it made sense, obviously, to do it right there,” Britton said. “We worked on it all throughout 2019 while still producing beer, and then we were ready to go in January 2020.”

Everyone knows what happened next.

“We had just opened our doors, and then a couple months later, it came to a halt because of COVID,” he said. “It was an interesting time. It forced us to kind of relook at the brand and pivot and decide what fell within the guidelines of what we could and couldn’t do.”

The pivots they came up with not only kept the business afloat during the pandemic, they may have actually raised its profile.

“No place could open and serve food, but we were allowed to deliver food — and beer, for the first time in Massachusets. So we started doing takeout. We didn’t have barbecue as a food option at the time, and Mike came up with the great idea to say, ‘hey, how cool would it be to have fresh barbecue and beer delivered to your door?’

“So we added that as a takeout option, and it was the most popular one we had,” Britton continued. “Mike stayed up nights smoking meat — night after night after night, just to meet demand. So we were delivering barbecue and beer to door to door, and it stuck. We still have great barbecue today; we kept it on the menu.”

Murals in Vanished Valley’s lower level reflect the theme of the drowned Quabbin towns.

Murals in Vanished Valley’s lower level reflect the theme of the drowned Quabbin towns.

Between the successful delivery operation, as well as two Paycheck Protection Program loans and an Economic Injury Disaster Loan, the team was able to keep the operation running. “It was a stressful year, but we made it. Once we were allowed to open the doors, we took all the necessary precautions with social distancing and things like that. It kept the lights on, and it kept the brand alive.”

 

Beneath the Surface

Some of the brewery’s beer selections — 1939 Amber Ale, Cellar Hole Series, Lost Town Stout, etc. — pay homage to the history of the Quabbin.

“The name itself, Vanished Valley, is the tip of the cap to the Quabbin Reservoir and the people that sacrificed for the benefit of others,” Britton said. “We try to keep the names of the beers as Quabbin-esque as possible. Sometimes it’s hard to do, and we just come up with other ideas. But the brand itself commemorates the Quabbin area.”

At any given time, Vanished Valley makes, pours, and distributes — to liquor stores and other restaurants across Massachusetts, from New York to Cape Cod — an array of IPAs, ales, stouts, and more, he added.

“We are very IPA-heavy, but that’s not to say that we don’t appreciate and still produce the classic brands, like a good lager or a pilsner. Some of our bestsellers in-house are actually our light beers. But when we distribute, the more popular ones are the IPAs.”

Britton explained that Vanished Valley straddles two different models.

“When you’re thinking about a brewery, you can be one of three different types of breweries. You can be a contract brewer, where you hire someone to brew your beer for you, and they send it out, and that’s it. Look at Jim Koch’s story with Sam Adams; that’s how he started. Then there’s a straight manufacturing-like brewery, where all you’re doing is pumping liquid out the back door and putting it on the shelf in the store.

“Then there’s us. We’re a brewpub,” he went on. “We wanted to have the food element, but we didn’t want to give up on the opportunity for mass distribution. So we built the brewery to be a distribution model, but the retail side of the house is a straight brewpub. So I don’t need to produce a ton of beer for here, but I need to produce a ton of beer for the market. We wanted to go at it from both angles.”

As for the food element, Vanished Valley serves a broad menu of appetizers, soups and salads, wood-fired pizza, burgers and other handhelds, and, of course, barbecue platters featuring pulled pork, brisket, chicken, and St. Louis-style ribs. Dinner hours are more crowded than lunch, and Thursday through Sunday draw the biggest crowds.

“We have a beer garden out there in the warmer weather, with a massive tent,” Britton said, adding that Vanished Valley now allows groups to rent the space for weddings and large parties. “We have music out there; Manny built an amazing stage for our bands. We have a firepit … all the stuff that makes for a better environment.”

Inside, the brewery has also hosted events from a murder mystery dinner to a bonsai tree event to charcuterie board design, as well as events featuring outside vendors, like a chili cookoff.

“We wanted to have the food element, but we didn’t want to give up on the opportunity for mass distribution. So we built the brewery to be a distribution model, but the retail side of the house is a straight brewpub.”

“We rent this for smaller parties, too: birthday parties, anniversaries, retirement parties, stuff like that. We try to be a one-stop shop for as much as possible,” Britton said. “It’s hard to do sometimes, but compared to other brewpubs and breweries in the region, we are very, very diverse.

“I think we’re doing really well compared to a lot of other breweries in the industry,” he went on. “There have been some closures in the state, and we’re not going to be one of them. But you constantly have to tailor things to the customer, and that’s a constantly moving target. So one of the bigger challenges is staying fresh.”

 

Lager Than Life

Despite some shifts in the market, Britton said, Vanished Valley is doing well on both the brewpub and distribution sides.

“Our first struggle was dealing with the holy-grail beers — you know, what’s the next best thing? That’s what the craft-beer fanatics want — the search for the white whale, or whatever they want to call it. We were one of those whales initially, and we gained a lot of loyal customers, but there were some falloffs of people that wanted to find the next best thing.”

Another challenge has been the rise of ready-to-drink cocktails. “That sector of the industry is really doing a number on craft beers,” he said. “And now you have CBD-infused seltzers and stuff like that. So our distribution has gone down a little bit because of that.

“But our overall growth in sales has continued every year because of what we do here in the retail area with the restaurant,” Britton added. “If we were a straight production brewery, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But on the restaurant side, the amazing customers we get here — from a local standpoint and people from out of state — have helped us stay afloat as a small, local business. We’re still very young. We’ve been going at it since 2017, but we’re still young.”

Vanished Valley also makes an effort to give back to the community, such as a beer produced to honor veterans every November, with proceeds donated to veteran organizations. The brewery also sponsors golf tournaments and gets involved with events like Ride to Remember, which honors fallen heroes.

“This is our backyard,” Britton said. “We all grew up here, and we’ve got to take care of it.”

Despite the challenges throughout the years, he added, Vanished Valley has continued to grow — from three employees just a few years ago to more than 30 today.

“We’ve done really well for ourselves. We’ve made a home for a lot of great customers that we appreciate so much. And the town has been nice to work with; they appreciate what we’re doing here from an economic standpoint. It’s just been a fun ride.”

HCC, I Found Light Against All Odds Partner to Help Women at Risk

By Contributor
Education

Giving a Hand Up

 

On April 30, representatives from Holyoke Community College and the Springfield-based nonprofit I Found Light Against All Odds agreed to work closely to increase educational and workforce training opportunities for young women at risk for homelessness. 

HCC President George Timmons and Stefan Davis, CEO, president, and founder of the Springfield-based I Found Light Against All Odds, met at the college to sign a memorandum of understanding outlining the terms of the agreement.  

I Found Light Against All Odds provides support services for young women to help address social and economic issues that can lead to poverty and homelessness. Specifically, by signing this memorandum, HCC and the foundation agree to broaden support services for area women, ages 18-20, to help them obtain safe housing and career opportunities through education and training. 

“This agreement is firmly in line with HCC’s mission and vision to remove barriers to student success, to break cycles of poverty, and provide opportunities for education and training that will allow more young women to be successful, earn a livable wage, and enjoy all that life has to offer,” Timmons said.

According to statistics cited in the memorandum of understanding, Hampden County has a poverty rate of 16.9%, which is higher than the national average of 11.5%. Meanwhile, the poverty rates in Springfield and Holyoke are even higher at 25.5% and 26%, respectively. 

“This agreement is firmly in line with HCC’s mission and vision to remove barriers to student success, to break cycles of poverty, and provide opportunities for education and training that will allow more young women to be successful, earn a livable wage, and enjoy all that life has to offer.”

“At the same time, research shows that many community-college students in Massachusetts experience hunger and/or homelessness, as well as other types of basic needs insecurity that can serve as barriers to degree completion and thereby limit economic sustainability and mobility,” the memorandum states.

Davis thanked Timmons and HCC faculty for the partnership. “We look forward to working with you and your staff to help these young women that are in darkness, searching for light and education. These women have dealt with a lot of trauma throughout their lives and are looking for ways to end the cycle of poverty. This collaboration proves that we care about them and that they have our support.”

Through the agreement, the foundation is looking to connect with HCC’s existing academic support services, such as admissions and financial-aid counseling, as well as career and transfer advising and more. 

“It’s a natural fit between an agency that works to support young women and a college, HCC, which is known for its wraparound support model,” said Jeff Hayden, HCC’s vice president of Business and Community Services.

Before the signing, Davis introduced a video about I Found Light Against All Odds that featured interviews from two of its consumers. One of them was Alisandra Pantoja from Springfield, who attended the April 30 event. 

Pantoja also stood beside Davis as he put pen to paper. She will be taking advantage of all the opportunities outlined in the agreement as a student at HCC starting in September, and plans to major in human services. “I like working with people,” she said.

Massachusetts Senate Proposes Free Community College for All

By Contributor
Education

Expanded Opportunity

 

On May 6, Senate leaders unveiled MassEducate, a proposal for tuition-free, universal community college for all Massachusetts residents, aimed at boosting the state’s workforce and expanding opportunity for students and families in every part of the Commonwealth.

The announcement was made during an event at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, where Senate President Karen Spilka, Senate Ways & Means Chair Michael Rodrigues, and Senate Higher Education Chair Jo Comerford gathered with members of the Senate, presidents of the Commonwealth’s 15 community colleges, business leaders, students, and advocates.

“Today, we shift conversations about college from ‘I wish’ to ‘I will’ for thousands of students and families in Massachusetts,” Spilka said. “We are investing in talent that is right here at home and opening the workforce floodgates to employers who are starved for graduates, so Massachusetts keeps the competitive edge that we pride ourselves in.”

MassEducate would invest $75.5 million in new spending to cover tuition and fees for all residents, as well as up to $1,200 for books, supplies, and other costs to students who make up to 125% of median income in the state. Pell-eligible students already eligible for a books stipend through state financial aid would also be eligible for a stipend for books, supplies, and costs of attendance, for a combined amount of up to $2,400 per year.

“Today, we shift conversations about college from ‘I wish’ to ‘I will’ for thousands of students and families in Massachusetts.”

“With the historic investments announced today, ushering in universally free community college and more, the Senate doubles down on our commitment to build back the power and promise of public higher education,” Comerford said. “The Senate investments will propel the Commonwealth forward toward greater social equity and greater economic competitiveness.”

The Senate’s plan, which will be included in the chamber’s FY 2025 budget, would continue to invest in programs created in the FY 2024 budget, including $18 million in free nursing programs at community colleges and $24 million in free community college for residents over age 25.

Students would be eligible for free tuition, fees, and the stipend in the fall 2025 semester if the proposal is included in the Commonwealth’s final FY 2025 budget.

To support students whose education paths can be jeopardized by unanticipated life events, Senate leaders announced the creation of the Student Persistence Fund, a $10 million investment that would go directly toward aiding community colleges and state universities in supporting low-income students with such costs that are shown to put someone’s chance of finishing school at risk, such as transportation, childcare, or food insecurity.

Understanding that retention and graduation is directly tied to support systems like advising and career planning, the Senate also proposed an $18.3 investment in the Supporting Urgent Community College Equity through Student Services (SUCCESS) program, which is designed for community colleges to invest in wraparound supports and services using models proven to strengthen outcomes for students facing systemic barriers, especially for colleges’ most underserved populations.

To ensure the long-term fiscal sustainability of the program, the Senate’s proposal would institute annual tuition-increase caps at community colleges set at an inflation index. And to hold community colleges accountable for producing positive outcomes, the proposal creates a working group to re-evaluate community-college performance funding, aimed at better aligning state funding with key metrics such as student success and workforce alignment.

Recognizing that many Massachusetts students opt directly for four-year universities, the budget makes a $105 million investment in the Massachusetts financial-assistance program MassGrant Plus, which keeps college costs low for students at all public colleges in the Commonwealth. This increased investment builds on recent investments that have allowed all Pell-eligible students in Massachusetts to go to a community college, state university, or UMass campus without paying tuition or fees.

The proposal additionally includes policy directives to study future paths to success for the Commonwealth’s students. It directs the Department of Higher Education to improve the credit transfer pathway between two- and four-year institutions so students can easily transfer to a public four-year institution. It also creates a new commission to evaluate current state financial assistance for students to attend state universities and UMass and evaluate ways to further ensure accessibility and affordability of an education at these institutions.

Research Probes Relationship Between Sleep, Memory in Infants

By Contributor
Technology

The Science of Naps

A UMass Amherst sleep scientist, funded with $6.7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has launched two unprecedented studies that will track over time the brain development of infants and preschoolers to confirm the role of napping in early life and to identify the bioregulatory mechanisms involved.

Rebecca Spencer, a professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences who is well-known for her groundbreaking research into napping, is testing her theories about what’s happening in the hippocampus — the short-term-memory area of the brain — as babies and young children undergo nap transitions.

This new research is expected to become the gold standard of scientific evidence that emphasizes the importance of healthy sleep for young children as their brains develop. The findings will help inform nap policies for preschool and pre-kindergarten and be useful to teachers and parents of both neurotypical and neurodiverse children.

“The work we’ve been doing has always pointed to this interaction of sleep and brain development,” said Spencer, who carries out research in her Somneurolab at UMass Amherst. “We think that kids get ready to transition out of naps when the brain is big enough to hold all the information of the day until nighttime sleep.”

The study involving preschoolers is a collaboration between Spencer at UMass Amherst; Tracy Riggins, a developmental psychologist specializing in memory development at the University of Maryland (UMD); and Gregory Hancock, a UMD professor of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. Previous research by Spencer and Riggins showed differences in the hippocampi of kids who nap compared to those who have transitioned out of naps.

“The work we’ve been doing has always pointed to this interaction of sleep and brain development. We think that kids get ready to transition out of naps when the brain is big enough to hold all the information of the day until nighttime sleep.”

“So far, we’ve used cross-sectional approaches,” said Spencer, referring to research that analyzes data at one point in time, as opposed to longitudinal studies that involve repeated observation over time. “We really need to show longitudinally within a child that the point when they transition out of naps is predicted by a transition in the development of their hippocampus.”

The hippocampus is the short-term location for memories before they move to the cortex for long-term storage. Naps allow children with an immature hippocampus to process memories. Young children give up their afternoon nap, not based on their age, but their brain development, Spencer hypothesized.

“Naps are beneficial to everybody. Naps protect memory for everybody, no matter what age. Kids who are habitual nappers really need the nap. If they don’t nap, they get catastrophic forgetting. That’s the difference between habitual and non-habitual nappers — not how good is the nap, but how bad is staying awake,” she explained.

Added Riggins, “in the end, being able to tell parents that those little deviations from routine that keep their children from napping might not have these huge implications for a neurotypical child in the long run would be great. And the more we know about how the brain works in a typically developing child during this nap transition, the more we will be able to know about where we could possibly intervene to help neurodiverse children — like children with autism and ADHD, whose sleep patterns tend to be disrupted — since we will have some sort of scientific basis.”

 

Go to Sleep

The research team is recruiting 180 children, ages 3 to 5. The researchers will track their brain development, memory performance, and nap status over the course of one year at three checkpoints. During the first and second sessions, the children will wear activity-tracking watches and EEG equipment to record naps and overnight sleep. They will also play memory games before and after naps. The children will undergo an MRI brain scan during the third session.

Monica and David Dumlao signed up their son Miles, 4, for the preschool study after watching the Netflix documentary series Babies, which features Spencer in the episode about sleep. “We like learning about the neuroscience behind brain development,” Monica Dumlao said at a recent study session in Spencer’s lab. “We thought this was a good opportunity to contribute to the science about the importance of naps.”

In the three-part infant study on nap transitions and memory, Spencer is studying the period before and after babies transition from two naps — one in the morning and one in the afternoon — to one, richer afternoon nap. She is recruiting 140 infants 7 to 9 months old. The babies will play a memory game before and after their naps. Their brain activity will be recorded during their naps using a non-invasive electrode cap. The sessions will take place at 9, 12, and 15 months.

“We think as they are getting ready to drop the morning nap, staying awake in that morning interval will be less and less damaging to their memory,” Spencer said. “But we don’t think that’s going to happen with the afternoon nap at this age. We think the afternoon nap stays superimportant.”

Mary McGovern Takes the Reins as President of Country Bank

By
Country Bank president Mary McGovern
Banking and Financial Services Cover Story

A Community Asset

 

Country Bank president Mary McGovern

Country Bank president Mary McGovern

 

Country Bank, according to its slogan, is “made to make a difference.”

Mary McGovern has taken that as a personal challenge.

“I’ve been at several institutions, public institutions, that run a little differently than mutuals, having to answer to shareholders every quarter,” said McGovern, who recently became Country’s first female president in its 174-year history. “With a mutual bank, we feel we take a different approach with our customers, and our involvement in the community means a lot to them. It’s a differentiator.”

McGovern brings three decades of context and experience — at different types of institutions — to that philosophy.

Prior to her 13-year rise at Country Bank, where she has served as chief financial officer, executive vice president, and chief operating officer, McGovern served in management roles at Danversbank, Capital Crossing Bank, and Boston Private Bank & Trust. Her areas of expertise include finance, operations, information technology, retail banking, commercial lending, financial and credit analysis, compliance, risk, sales, and strategic business and relationship development.

“With a mutual bank, we feel we take a different approach with our customers, and our involvement in the community means a lot to them. It’s a differentiator.”

“I started at Boston Private when it was a de novo with $80 million in assets. I was the 20th or 22nd person they hired. I came in on the ground floor in a finance role, in accounting, and grew with the department,” she recalled.

After that institution went public and was acquired, she left, earned her MBA, and moved to Capital Crossing in the late ’90s, doing a lot of work with distressed real estate. Danversbank, her next stop, was a reunion of sorts with some individuals she had worked with at Boston Private.

“They were like Country Bank is today, a nice, local, mutual community bank,” she said, adding that she served Danversbank as senior vice president and chief accounting officer. “But they went public in 2008 and were sold in 2011, and my position was eliminated.”

So, the same year, she joined the team at Country — and has never looked back.

“The mission is to be the bank of choice in Central and Western Massachusetts,” McGovern told BusinessWest. “I’m excited to lead as the first female president of Country Bank as we approach our 175th anniversary. It’s a good opportunity to get out and talk in the community, talk to our customers, put a new face in front of them. It’s been really exciting.”

Country Bank’s productive partnership with the WooSox

Country Bank’s productive partnership with the WooSox is reflected by its prominent right-field signage.

From a bottom-line perspective, she said, Country is doing well, even showing growth in the mortgage market, despite high rates and higher prices.

“Obviously people still have to buy and sell homes and move different places. The pipeline may not be as robust, but there’s still a lot of activity.”

On the commercial side, the bank is being selective, focusing on building lasting relationships and not targeting huge volume for its own sake, to maintain liquidity. “We’re looking for 5% to 6% growth in loans this year, so we’re keeping busy for sure.”

Geographically, the bank is in a growth mode as well. With a physical footprint that currently stretches from Springfield to Worcester, with the Ware headquarters between those two cities, County is adding two additional locations to the east this year — a second in Worcester and one in Uxbridge — while making plans to add two more branches to the west, in Springfield and another community.

Earlier this year, the board of trustees announced it had full confidence in McGovern to lead that strategy, as well as all of Country’s other operations and activities in the community. Paul Scully, who has been president and chief executive officer since 2004, remains in the CEO role.

“We are thrilled to announce Mary’s appointment as the next president of Country Bank,” James Phaneuf, board chair, said when the selection was announced. “Mary’s proven track record, dedication, and strategic vision make her the ideal candidate for this role.

“In a challenging time of food insecurity and other challenges out there, it’s important to give back to local nonprofits. They need our support to do their important work. That’s valuable to our staff, and I believe it’s valuable to our customers as well.”

“The board is confident that Mary’s leadership will drive the bank’s continued success and growth,” he added. “With her extensive experience, strategic mindset, and dedication to excellence, Mary is poised to lead the bank into a new era of innovation and customer satisfaction while maintaining its position as one of the most highly capitalized financial institutions in the region.”

 

Community Partner

Country is also well-known for its community involvement. Those efforts have focused in recent years on a number of priorities, including food insecurity, health, and education, as well as homeless shelters, senior-serving programs, youth organizations, and more.

To that end, Country reported more than $1.2 million in donations in 2023, with 463 organizations receiving grants. In addition, the bank’s team members volunteered 1,255 hours of community service in 2023, while 37 employees served on a total of 65 nonprofit boards and committees.

“We are a valued piece of the community. We try to give back to all the communities we serve,” McGovern said, adding that the bank’s financial-literacy programs continue to be a priority, as is a partnership with the WooSox — signified by a very prominent Country Bank sign in right field at Polar Park — and the team’s WooStars awards and its teacher-recognition program.

“We’re just continuing to build on a great foundation set by Paul in his 20 years here,” she added. “Being a community bank, we’re really invested in the health of our communities.”

McGovern speaks the language of community-bank presidents in Western Mass. that place a high value on local philanthropy.

“We’ll continue to do a hybrid approach. It seems to be working. The staff seems to be happy. We don’t see that changing — in the foreseeable future, anyway.”

“We’re different from a big commercial bank that’s not as worried about the individual communities that they serve,” she said. “As a mutual bank, obviously it’s important to make money, but making money also allows us to give back. So we’re trying to give back to our communities. In a challenging time of food insecurity and other challenges out there, it’s important to give back to local nonprofits. They need our support to do their important work. That’s valuable to our staff, and I believe it’s valuable to our customers as well.”

Also of value to customers is a physical presence in their communities, even at a time when online banking is dominant.

“There are differences of opinion among financial institutions, some of whom are pulling back from their banking centers,” McGovern said. “But we feel it’s important to support the different ways our customers want to bank.

“There are plenty of the younger generation who don’t want to talk to people, who would prefer to do everything online; self-service is important to them,” she added. “But we have a good component of customers who like to go in and talk to people face to face. Even younger people want to sit down and talk to somebody when they’re buying their first house; it’s an important, life-changing kind of event.”

In addition, she said, “I feel it’s important that we show our presence. It’s hard to say that you’re in Springfield without having signage there. We have a business center in Tower Square, but it’s not quite as visible as having a branch location with a sign.”

Country Bank has consolidated in some cases as well — for instance, it used to have three branches in Ware, but now only houses its headquarters and a digital banking center there. And many branches are staffed with fewer employees than in years past, to reflect how many customers bank online only.

“But while there’s less foot traffic, we’re still there to serve people, allowing customers to bank how they want.”

Other elements of the bank experience have changed over the years as well, including how — and where — employees work.

“Since the pandemic, it’s been a different way of working,” she told BusinessWest. “For some time, we were fully remote. Over time, we went with a more flexible work arrangement. So the average employee works three days in and two days out. There are some with a little more flexibility based on what kind of job it is.”

While some employees prefer to come in five days a week, and do so, McGovern added, for most of them — those who don’t deal face to face with the public, anyway — working remotely at least part of the time is a valued part of their job. “I don’t see how we can be competitive without that. I know different institutions that have lost staff when they requested people come in five days.

“So we’ll continue to do a hybrid approach,” she went on. “It seems to be working. The staff seems to be happy. We don’t see that changing — in the foreseeable future, anyway.”

 

Making a Difference

McGovern also doesn’t want to change a culture at Country Bank that she feels benefits both employees and customers.

“It’s hard to be a differentiator when all banks sell the same products, but I feel we are different,” she said. “Our people are spending a lot of their life doing something they like in an institution they like with peers they like. And we’re trying to keep that culture going.”

The challenge, she said, is understanding that employees want and appreciate hybrid work schedules, while maintaining a positive office culture whether they’re in the office or not.

“It’s a fine line managing both aspects,” she said. “But I think we’ve got a good thing going, and hopefully I can keep it going into the future.”

The Urban Food Brood Thrives with a Unique Model

By
Andrea and Tim Monson
Restaurants Special Coverage

Good Vibrations

Andrea and Tim Monson

Andrea and Tim Monson, owners of Monsoon Roastery, are two of the original partners who brought the Urban Food Brood to life.

Almost a decade ago, Tim and Andrea Monson started a small business roasting and selling coffee, which grew to the point where they opened a retail and operating space on Albany Street in Springfield in 2019.

Not long after, the owners of Monsoon Roastery began talking to the owners of two other small businesses — Nosh, a downtown Springfield eatery, and Urban Artisan Farm, which specializes in hydroponic food production — about a concept that has now become one of the city’s most unique food-centric success stories.

“It started after COVID when small businesses were struggling to survive,” Andrea said. “We already did business with Nosh — we would carry her food products, and then they would carry our coffee. So that kind of social capital started very early on. We actually did that with a lot of small businesses. So we started to think … what if we were a small business corporation — a bunch of us kind of fighting together?”

That’s how the Monsons, Nosh owner Teri Skinner, and Urban Artisan Farm owner Jack Wysocki launched their concept, envisioning a place where small businesses could support each other in a shared space with a common kitchen and other amenities, and people could come stop by for lunch or a coffee and bring home some fresh produce, meat, or other items.

“We started to think … what if we were a small business corporation — a bunch of us kind of fighting together?”

“It took us three years to get financing and to get organized,” Monson explained. “This was an office building. So we had to transform it into food-manufacturing collaborative, which cost a lot of money. In the middle of COVID, there were a lot of shortages, a lot of delays. But we kept fighting for this dream and investing our own funds and sacrificing a lot of time and a lot of sweat equity, and it finally came together in July of last year.”

Skinner recalls collaborating with the other founders on ideas, looking into grant funding to turn the building on Albany Street — a stretch of road known as Gasoline Alley, due to the giant fuel tanks that line it — into a collaborative workspace that eventually became known as the Urban Food Brood.

“The three of us sort of came together, wanting to expand our businesses,” she said, adding that the project ran into a lot of infrastructure and renovation issues that weren’t expected, and cost more money than expected. “But now it’s flourishing,” she added.

Nosh is actually the latest — and largest — operation to move into the space, which, along with Monsoon and Urban Artisan Farm, also includes Corsello Butcheria, Happy Man Freeze Dried, Wicked Whisk, and Rocka Docka Foods.

Vincent Corsello

Vincent Corsello says the Urban Food Brood offers fresh options amid a food desert.

“Happy Man had a certified home kitchen, but he was expanding tremendously. He needed a kitchen, so he ended up taking a room here,” Skinner said. “Wicked Whisk acquired a food truck, but she also needed a commercial kitchen so she could produce her products, as she was growing as well.”

Vincent Corsello, who runs Corsello Bucheria, an Easthampton business that has expanded into the Urban Food Brood, said he took part in a pig roast on Albany Street a few years ago and was struck by the uniqueness of the setup.

“This place is magic. There’s such a vibe here,” he remembered thinking. “So I started coming — I don’t know to what end, exactly, but they were open to a collaboration. They got a grant to do a community kitchen, and I said, ‘can I be a part of it?’ And they said ‘yes.’ And then we went from there.”

 

Creating a Vibe

The building, with its community spirit and that creative vibe — the walls are lined with works from local artists, which are displayed on a rotating basis and available for sale — is a stark contrast to its surroundings, Corsello said.

“It’s in the middle of a brownfield, essentially. They call it Gasoline Alley for a reason; we’re surrounded by a million gallons of gasoline.

“I have a big window, and I did a brick facade outside the bakery so you can look through the window and see the bakers cooking.”

“But it’s easy to get to, and there’s plenty of parking, so it’s a good location,” he was quick to add. “And the vibe really attracted me to this this campus; it’s like a modern-day boys’ club, only it includes all different types of people.”

Indeed, Monson noted that she’s seen people of different backgrounds, experiences, and even religious persuasions enjoying the welcoming vibe of the space together.

“We have students, we have professionals, we have the police, we have the firefighters, we have EMTs, social workers, teachers … we have so many different people that come in here to enjoy the food or the coffee or the environment. Everybody’s here.

“The one thing I hear over and over again — unfortunately — is, ‘wow, I can’t believe this is in Springfield,’” she went on. “I both love and hate that. As a Springfield resident, a Springfield business owner, someone who grew up in Springfield, I feel like Springfield always gets the short end of the stick. There’s a lot of negative perception about Springfield. And we’re trying to disprove that. We’re saying, ‘hey, look, we built this thing, and people are coming.’

“I’ve heard, ‘this feels like I stepped into Northampton,’ which is, I guess, a compliment. But we’re not Northampton; we’re Springfield.”

Teri Skinner

Teri Skinner, seen here at her downtown Nosh location, is the most recent of the original Urban Food Brood partners to move to Gasoline Alley; she will continue to operate at both sites.

Corsello said the uniqueness extends to the business model, with the various tenants sharing one register, and the businesses sharing their products.

“So when I make sandwiches, I use Teri’s bread, and I use Jack’s vegetables. We use each other’s products to create. So you not only have an opportunity to get something for yourself, but if you like what you taste, you can buy any of those components here at the market. Plus, a lot of Springfield is kind of a food desert, and we’re small businesses offering locally created food products.”

He said patrons appreciate being able to eat or drink something on site, then bring something home to prepare.

“Anybody can come in here and get a cup of coffee, they can shop, they can get some vegetables, they can get some meat, they can get something freeze-dried. For us, it’s a model that doesn’t come without its challenges, and we’re still figuring some of that stuff out, but it’s very unique. People like a one-stop shop.”

Skinner, whose downtown Nosh location has long had an artistic, funky décor, appreciates the way the Urban Food Brood prioritizes art as well.

“People come here, and they’ll pick up some sausage and go, ‘you know, let me get a kombucha, let me get some mushrooms, let me get some spinach.’ And you go home, and you have all of this really good product that’s manufactured here in Springfield.”

“We have lots of artists that come in and display their work on a monthly basis, and then people can purchase their artwork. They’re in a rotation; if the art is there for too long, it seems like it’s just part of the décor. So it moves in and out, and there are some super talented artists that provide works for us.”

Monson said many artists have sold works in the space, or even gotten commissions based on their displays. “So it’s very cool that we can provide that.”

Skinner appreciates other elements of the Urban Food Brood vibe, like how it feels like the center of a town, only indoors and on a smaller scale, with each of the businesses acting as a storefront of sorts.

“I’m super happy with how it all came out,” she said. “I have a big window, and I did a brick facade outside the bakery so you can look through the window and see the bakers cooking. Vincent has the same idea; so do the others. That’s kind of neat.”

The complex, which is open Tuesday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., also hosts regular events, such as food truck Fridays and Thursday farmers markets from 4 to 8 p.m., which have already begun for this season.

“It’s early in the season for farmers markets, but hopefully, as the season progresses, we’ll have more and more items. We’re also going to try to do music,” Skinner said.

A sign outside the Urban Food Brood

A sign outside the Urban Food Brood lists the businesses currently operating there.

“The thing that’s great about the nighttime market is that all of our downtown Springfield markets have always been during the day, when people are at work. What are they going to do with their products after they’ve purchased them? Are they going to put them in the car or bring them back to the office? So this is kind of nice. People can just stop on their way home.”

 

Fueling Growth

Andrea Monson said the partners in the Urban Food Brood have been pleased with the organic growth of the Gasoline Alley complex.

“We don’t actively market; we rely on word of mouth,” she told BusinessWest. “And I have to say that the people who come here are very cool. They’re great customers. They’re great to my staff, they’re great to all of us, and they’re very supportive. They tell people who tell people who tell people, and now we have this amazing group of people that come here to support us.

“The cool thing is, we all have our own following. Wicked Whisk has their own following. Nosh has their own following. People come here, and they’ll pick up some sausage and go, ‘you know, let me get a kombucha, let me get some mushrooms, let me get some spinach.’ And you go home, and you have all of this really good product that’s manufactured here in Springfield.”

And it’s not just people from the city, Corsello said. Urban Food Brood has been drawing from all the surrounding towns, steadily developing a reputation … not as something vaguely Northampton-ish, but something uniquely and vibrantly Springfield.

“We’re really excited about it,” he said. “It’s only the beginning.”

Dave Hayes Cultivates Community Around Weather

By
Dave Hayes
Features Special Coverage

Beyond the Forecast

Dave Hayes

Dave Hayes

Like many New Englanders, Dave Hayes remembers the significant weather events of his childhood, like the Mother’s Day snowstorm that struck the region in 1977, dropping more than a foot of snow on parts of Massachusetts, and the Blizzard of 1978 that crippled much of Southern New England the following February.

But he also remembers something else weather-related from his youth: watching a Boston-area forecast, intrigued by the bright colors of the radar display, and then almost immediately watching the skies outside his living room grow dark, and a storm suddenly arise.

“Five minutes later, what was on the radar was overhead, and something lit up inside of me. I became obsessed with the weather,” he said — to the point where he’d flip between local TV forecasts to compare them. “I found I gravitated toward the meteorologist who explained why the weather is doing what it’s doing, rather than just what it’s doing.”

Hayes never lost that obsession with the weather, and it led to an unlikely, donation-funded career as Dave Hayes the Weather Nut, through which he posts and discusses the day’s current weather and upcoming forecast on social media, as his myriad followers converse about it all in the comments.

And there are a lot of followers — more than 57,000 on Facebook, in fact, and 6,600 on Twitter.

But while Hayes is widely known on Facebook today, early in 2011, he had become disenchanted with the site and deactivated his account.

“I didn’t get it yet. I didn’t understand virality and sharing with people and the idea that this might possibly be useful in some way.”

However, when a tornado struck Springfield and a host of other communities on June 1 of that year, he heard talk of his friends chattering online about what he thought about the destructive event. So he eventually logged back on and started talking more often about weather events. When an acquaintance complained that he was doing too much of that, Hayes decided to create a page separate from his personal account, called Dave Hayes the Weather Nut, where friends — or anyone else — could follow him if they wanted to.

And what a year that was for weather in Western Mass. — 2011 featured not only the tornado, but Tropical Storm Irene in August, the freak pre-Halloween snowstorm that felled countless trees, and a few other events. His reporting between 2011 and the summer of 2012 had about 200 people taking part in the local weather conversation, and his reports in the fall of 2012 on Hurricane Sandy — which seemed to be threatening New England before turning toward New Jersey — tripled that, to more than 600.

“People wanted to know what was going on,” he said. “I didn’t get it yet. I didn’t understand virality and sharing with people and the idea that this might possibly be useful in some way — a hub for weather that’s interesting. But I kept doing it.”

Dave Hayes collects raw data from numerous sources and uses it to craft his daily reports.

Dave Hayes collects raw data from numerous sources and uses it to craft his daily reports.

A blizzard in February 2013 saw Hayes’s audience crest to more than 1,000 people. “People said how helpful my work was to them. And as someone who hadn’t really launched in life yet, I wanted to be helpful to people. So that lit a fire inside of me, and I said, ‘I’m going to do this daily. This is something that people find useful.’”

When he began daily reports, which continue today, the audience doubled to 2,000, then swelled above 10,000 early in 2014, during a colder and snowier winter than any Western Mass. has seen since. Around the same time, he was laid off from a sales job when his company downsized due to the lingering effects of the Great Recession.

“Without a job, looking for work, not finding anything, I went deeper into weather reporting,” he said, and began attracting the attention of public radio, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and other media — and wondering if this could actually become a career.

 

Weather or Not

Indeed, when the page was taking off in 2014, Hayes’s father and others in his life started asking him seriously if he could make a living at this, he recalled. “I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t even thought of it. I was just doing something I love.”

But around that time, crowdfunding was becoming more popular, so he threw up a GoFundMe link.

“Without a job, looking for work, not finding anything, I went deeper into weather reporting.”

“I figured, if people want to support my work financially, they’ll do it. If they think it has value, they’ll kick me a few bucks. I linked to it during big storms, and during 2015, I produced a crowdfunded support drive, about four or five weeks, talking about different aspects of what I was doing. I was teaching myself as I went along. It was a very unorthodox way of making a living.”

But Hayes did, in fact, begin to slowly generate a steady income through voluntary donations, and while he still does some paralegal work on the side, Dave Hayes the Weather Nut is, in fact, his living now. He compares the model to Patreon, a popular site through which people can directly support artists and writers producing content.

“It’s very unorthodox, how my life has played out,” he added. “You never know what’s going to happen until you work on something and share it with others.”

In creating daily content, Hayes curates his reports by gathering information from multiple sources, gathering data and modeling from the National Weather Service, private meteorological subscriptions, and personal weather stations, then creates his own forecasts and analysis that people from across Massachusetts and parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut have come to rely on.

“I’m not a meteorologist,” he said. “I pay for data subscriptions, read multiple forecast discussions from regional National Weather Service meteorologists, and obtain other trusted weather data in the Northeast region. I take all that information, along with my 35-plus years living in the Western Mass. region, and use my own process to produce my reports.”

Dave Hayes says winter storm trends can be slow-moving

Dave Hayes says winter storm trends can be slow-moving, while severe summer weather can emerge with little warning.

The next phase for Hayes will be a mobile app, which he plans to introduce in 2025, and which he hopes will replace his social-media presence, given a widespread problem of algorithms restricting the reach of social-media content creators — a real problem during fast-developing storms.

“Three out of four people look at my info from their smartphone, so I figured I need to have a way to reach people more directly, especially during the summer severe events,” he explained. “Winter storms develop more slowly. You see them building across the country over three or four days. But thunderstorms, microbursts, and tornadoes can form within five, 10, or 15 minutes.”

He plans to offer both free and paid versions of the app with different features, and will definitely retain the all-important interactive aspect, with users able to comment. After all, that may be the most compelling and popular aspect of his passion turned unlikely career.

“The way we watch the forecast has traditionally been on TV; you consume the forecast, and that’s it. There’s no conversation about it,” Hayes explained. “What I’ve tried to create with social media is a two-way street where we can go back and forth and answer as many questions as we can.”

It essentially adds another dimension to weather reports, one he’s been delighted to find so many people are passionate about.

“The way we watch the forecast has traditionally been on TV; you consume the forecast, and that’s it. There’s no conversation about it. What I’ve tried to create with social media is a two-way street where we can go back and forth and answer as many questions as we can.”

“People are talking to each other — ‘I got this much snow in Belchertown.’ ‘Oh, I got this much down in Palmer.’ It’s a whole community vibe around something that we all have to deal with. Everyone has unique lives, but we all have to deal with the weather. So by fostering this community, we can all talk about what’s impacting all of us.”

It also lends an element of “ground truth” in real time, he added. Because a temperature difference of a degree or two can turn rain into snow quickly, not only can he quickly adjust a report based on comments, but a weather forecast becomes not a static report, frozen in time, but a living, evolving thing.

 

Seeing the Light

Speaking of evolving, Hayes has taken note of the trend toward warmer, wetter winters over the past decade, as well as more flooding events. But he says he’s not a climatologist and continues to focus on his bread and butter — forecasting, reporting, and talking about each day’s weather with a growing fanbase in the tens of thousands.

Even “space weather,” as he put it, got plenty of attention recently, as followers snapped, shared, and commented on photos of the aurora borealis making a rare appearance across the U.S. on May 10. With the solar maximum not having hit its peak yet, such a shared experience might happen again within the next year or so.

“It was beautiful and otherworldly; humans think they’re amazing, and it really puts things into perspective, shows how small we are,” Hayes told BusinessWest. “But you don’t want too many solar storms. The Carrington Event in 1859 fried the entire telegraph system. One hundred and sixty-five years later, we’re a lot more reliant on the power grid for a lot of things. So while the aurora is fun to see, I don’t want to see it too often.”

Bay Path Goes All In with Acquisition of Cambridge College

By
Bay Path University President Sandy Doran
Education Special Coverage

A Bold Step Forward

Bay Path University President Sandy Doran

Bay Path University President Sandy Doran

 

As she talked about how Bay Path University’s acquisition of Cambridge College came about — and, more importantly, why — Sandy Doran, Bay Path’s president, turned the clock back almost a year to when the university undertook a ‘strengths and opportunities’ analysis to understand where its growth opportunities might lie.

This led to creation of a cross-disciplinary leadership task force to conduct an analysis of strategic growth opportunities, building on the things the school does well while also focusing on ways to amplify those traits.

This task force eventually identified five opportunities for growth — everything from graduate programs to business-to-business corporate sponsorships; from expansion of its online American Women’s College to growth in enrollment among Latino populations.

As it considered these opportunities and how to seize them, Doran said Bay Path, its leadership, and its board could “do some things around the edges” with all or several of them, as she put it, or “do something bold and think about our future in a transformational way.”

Given Bay Path’s recent history — one that has seen it achieve dramatic growth and rise from a two-year college to a four-year university with a growing slate of degree options and national recognition in fields like cybersecurity — the latter course was essentially a given, said Doran, now in her fifth year as president of the college, adding quickly that the question became what this bold move would be.

“Outside of Puerto Rico and New York City, Western Massachusetts has the largest Hispanic population in the United States. We knew that, in order to meet the needs of that population, we needed to grow our student services, we knew we needed additional support, and we identified it as a potential growth opportunity.”

As different opportunities were considered, the answer became an acquisition of Cambridge College, a Boston-based, private, nonprofit institution established in 1971, a move that should enable Bay Path to double its overall enrollment; gain a presence in other markets, including Boston and Puerto Rico, which Cambridge as a campus; and, overall, achieve growth in all those areas identified by the task force.

This includes enrollment among Hispanic populations, she said, noting that this is one of the fastest-growing constituencies in this region.

“Outside of Puerto Rico and New York City, Western Massachusetts has the largest Hispanic population in the United States,” Doran told BusinessWest. “We knew that, in order to meet the needs of that population, we needed to grow our student services, we knew we needed additional support, and we identified it as a potential growth opportunity.

“We wanted a partner that had experience serving this Hispanic market,” she went on, adding that Cambridge College, which is a designated Hispanic-serving institution, has this experience, among many other qualities.

Indeed, overall, Bay Path and Cambridge share a number of other strengths — everything from online programs (locally, Cambridge, which had a location in Springfield’s Tower Square, now offers programs only online) to meeting the needs of first-generation college students, said Doran, adding that the schools also share missions and values.

Longmeadow campus

Much of Bay Path’s growth is taking place beyond the borders of its Longmeadow campus.

“Those cultural aspects — of serving the same student populations, of thinking about our values and joining together with another organization and making sure that their values were compatible and strengthened ours — are key; we just knew that, without that shared mission, those shared values, we wouldn’t be able to move forward,” she said, adding that this merger represents the latest in a series of bold moves for Bay Path.

The ones to come before have taken it to levels that might not have been imagined 25 years ago. This latest one will build on those efforts and take the university to different places — quite literally, in the case of Puerto Rico and the Boston market — and figuratively when it comes to needed size and higher status among the region’s and country’s higher-ed institutions.

For this issue and its focus on education, BusinessWest takes an in-depth look at this intriguing merger — how it came about and what it means for Bay Path as it continues its recent history of taking bold steps.

 

Course of Action

Sounding much like area bank presidents, which have been harping on the need for size in a changing financial-services environment for years now, Doran said growth is perhaps more important than ever for institutions of higher education.

Given the spiraling costs of doing business and the many challenges facing colleges and universities, including demographics in the form of smaller high-school graduating classes, growth in overall enrollment is critical.

“To be a financially sustainable institution, it’s important to have 5,000 students or more,” she said, adding that Bay Path now surpasses that number. “Five thousand students gives you the resources, it gives you the financial strength, the revenue streams — all those things that are essential to a sustainable institution.”

And, as in the banking industry, there are different ways to achieve growth in higher education. One method is organic growth, through everything from more aggressive marketing to creation of new degree programs, especially at the graduate level, a course taken by many schools locally, including Bay Path.

But there are also opportunities to partner with other schools and, increasingly, to acquire them, especially as more struggle with enrollment, face uncertain futures, and, in some cases, even close their doors.

Doran said Bay Path has been looking at many growth strategies, including acquisition, and had looked at several different institutions.

“We talked to some colleges in the Southeast, we talked to some in the Southwest, we talked to some in the middle of the country, and ultimately, we were very fortunate to find a partner here in Massachusetts,” she said, adding that Cambridge College emerged as the option that made the most sense, for many reasons, especially those shared traits and values, as well as areas of focus — particularly online programs and service to Hispanic students — that would provide Bay Path with avenues for growth. “They had so much of what we were looking for in a partnership. What they have to offer lines up beautifully with what we were looking for.”

Doran said she didn’t know if Cambridge was looking to be acquired, but did know that it was looking to partner, as many schools are in these challenging times. Elaborating, she said Cambridge certainly suffered during the pandemic — again, as many schools did — but coming out of COVID, its enrollment has been increasing over the past few years, with much of that growth coming in online programs.

“It’s not a just a checklist of how you communicate with students and families whose first language is Spanish. Are we offering all the right supports? Do we understand the cultural nuances of how to serve the Hispanic market, which is very much growing in Western Mass.?”

And while talks with other potential acquisition candidates progressed to different degrees, Bay Path eventually crossed the finish line with Cambridge College because the ‘fit’ — the word you hear so often in these transactions — was right for both sides, and especially Bay Path.

“It’s one thing to read about mission and culture and values on a website and talk about it with people inside an organization,” Doran said. “But it’s really when the boards sit down, the leaders sit down, and you have a chance to meet with students that you get a true picture. I had the chance to meet with students at Cambridge College, and that is really what convinced me, the board, and others that this is really the right fit.

“And that’s because their students are our students,” she went on. “Half are students of color, half are first-generation students, 60% of their students are in graduate programs, and 60% are online.”

 

Class Acts

Getting back to the growth-strategy exercises of a year ago and the establishment of a matrix to determine whether a potential partner might be right for Bay Path, Doran said several necessary common threads were identified, with shared mission and values being just one.

Others include everything from a strong culture of innovation to an opportunity to “expand our reach,” as she put it; from a commitment to workforce development to strong business-to-business partnerships.

When it comes to expanding reach, this is a broad term that covers considerable ground, said Doran, encompassing everything from expansion into new geographic regions to reaching new populations to expansion of online and graduate programs.

Merging with Cambridge College allows the university to do all of that, she said, adding that the acquisition brings with it a number of huge growth opportunities.

As one example, she returned to the Hispanic population and Bay Path’s desire to better serve — and, yes, capture more of — that market, explaining why this acquisition makes sense for the institution.

“We have here a limited experience in terms of fully serving the Hispanic market,” she explained. “We’ve developed some student supports; we’ve given them some academic supports. If you peruse our website, you’ll see that many of our web pages are now in Spanish, so we can speak directly to students whose native language is Spanish and to their parents.

“But we knew that we didn’t know enough because there’s a huge cultural component,” she went on. “It’s not a just a checklist of how you communicate with students and families whose first language is Spanish. Are we offering all the right supports? Do we understand the cultural nuances of how to serve the Hispanic market, which is very much growing in Western Mass.?

“We really wanted to reach into that marketplace because we knew how important it was for Western Mass., and for the nation, for that matter,” she continued. “This is the fastest-growing population in the country, and as an institution, our job, our mission, is to serve those students with equally robust and dedicated resources.

There are other benefits to be gained from this acquisition, obviously, said Doran, who listed Cambridge College’s portfolio of graduate programs as another of them.

Elaborating, she explained that developing new graduate programs and bringing them to market is a costly, very involved process that can take years, when time is a luxury few institutions have.

“To bring a new program to market can take two to five years,” she explained. “So the opportunity to grow graduate programs by acquiring another college was absolutely essential to what we were thinking about, and with Cambridge, we’re acquiring about 30 new graduate programs.

“So if you think about it, even taking two years to bring a program to market, it would have taken 60 years,” she went on. “That’s a long time, even for me.”

 

Grade Expectations

Doran said full integration of Cambridge College into Bay Path will take 18 to 24 months, and over that time, several issues will be settled, including whether — and in what ways — the Cambridge College name will live on.

That name has some value in various markets, she said, adding that she hopes the brand lives on in some form.

Meanwhile, she’s more certain about other aspects of this acquisition, especially the part about it being a bold, decisive step at a time when such actions are required of higher-ed institutions looking to fully emerge from the challenging pandemic and post-pandemic periods in a position to not merely survive, but grow and thrive.

“I will credit our board with being such strong partners,” he said. “They’ve always been bold, they’ve always been strategic — we were the first in the region to have online education — and that kind of support is very critical.”

And it’s yet another example of how a school with a rich past is focused, as Doran put it, on thinking about the future in a transformational way.

Brendan Greeley Charts a Course for the Family Business

By
Brendan Greeley, president of the R.G. Greeley Co.
Commercial Real Estate Special Coverage

The Next Chapter

Brendan Greeley, president of the R.G. Greeley Co.

Brendan Greeley, president of the R.G. Greeley Co.

Growing up, Brendan Greeley never thought much about going to work for his father at the commercial real-estate firm he started the same year Brendan was born — the R.J. Greeley Co.

But as his undergraduate work was wrapping up at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, his father, Robert Greeley, asked him to start thinking about it.

And there was a lot to think about. Brendan didn’t really know much about this business, or business in general, and his college work didn’t exactly prepare him for that industry.

“I was a sociology and anthropology major with a minor in religion,” he said. “I was a singer in a band … and I never really thought much about my career.”

After telling his father he’d think about his invitation, Brendan sought the advice of one of his uncles, who told him, among other things, that commercial real estate was a good business for meeting … well, all kinds of people in many different businesses, exposure that could lead to different types of career opportunities.

“He said, ‘at the very least, you can go work for your dad for a little while, get a snapshot into different kinds of businesses, and see what you like,’” he recalled, adding that he went to work for his father for more than a little while, and eventually determined that commercial real estate was something he liked.

Fast-forwarding a little (we’ll go back and fill in some details later), Brendan learned a lot from his father, gradually assumed more responsibilities for running the business, and eventually became its president in 2017. After what he described as a somewhat difficult transition process, he bought his father out in 2019 and steered the company through the difficult COVID years and their aftermath.

Now, just over a year after his father passed away at age 73, the younger Greeley is writing new chapters in the history of the 43-year-old company. The firm is smaller now, with a staff of just two, but “doing more with less,” as he put it.

He is continuing to build on the portfolio of properties the firm handles, which is anchored by the Technology Park at Springfield Technical Community College in a collection of buildings that were once part of the Springfield Armory and later home to a massive Digital Equipment Corp. operation.

“My father always impressed upon me, from the beginning, that you have to go out and establish your network, the people you’re going to be doing business with — the people, as my father used to say, that you’re going to be in the trenches with.”

The Tech Park, as it’s called, has been around about as long as Brendan Greeley has been with the family business (which calls the park home itself), and it has been a career-long focal point and passion, he said, adding that the company has successfully filled most of the space vacated by a Liberty Mutual call center and continues to work to fill remaining vacancies in the sprawling complex.

“We had a great year last year — we brought on the Department of Developmental Services with a lease for just under 30,000 square feet for 10 years,” he said, adding that the state agency and other signed tenants now fill most of the 55,000 square feet once occupied by Liberty Mutual.

Meanwhile, the R.J Greeley Co. continues to respond to changes and trends within the market — everything from growing inventories on the office side of the ledger (a byproduct of remote work and hybrid schedules at businesses in virtually every sector) to an extreme tightening of the industrial and distribution markets, a byproduct of rising interest rates that have produced an environment in which it is far more advantageous to buy or lease than build new.

Technology Park at STCC

Brendan Greeley continues to build on his firm’s portfolio of properties, which is anchored by the Technology Park at STCC.

For this issue and its focus on commercial real estate, BusinessWest talked with Greeley about the market and what the future might bring, and about what might come next for the company that was started by his father and still bears his initials, but is now being steered by his youngest child.

 

Right Place and Time

As he talked about his time with the company, and especially about life in a family business, Greeley spoke for everyone who has ever had that experience when he said, “it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, that’s for sure.”

Elaborating, he described his father as a great real-estate broker, teacher, and mentor — “I wish I had his ability to mentor people and bring them along” — but not the easiest person to work with or for, and someone who didn’t think much about succession planning, didn’t really want to think about it, and did so only when the matter was pressed.

Indeed, when asked when his father first started talking to him about succession planning, Greeley laughed and said, “never.”

“That was a painful process,” he recalled. “Succession planning was really hard for him. He never really thought about wanting to retire, it seems, and he was pretty reluctant to think about it.”

So much so that Greeley admitted to thinking about perhaps doing something else because of that reluctance.

“I had to impose some timelines to move things along,” he went on. Eventually, a successful transition was achieved, made easier by some very strong years leading to that changing of hands, punctuated by the brokered sale of the former Westinghouse property to one of the players trying to bring a casino to Springfield.

Flashing back further, Greeley recalled that, as he entered the business, he certainly learned a lot from his father, especially when it came to the all-important work of getting in front of people building and maintaining relationships — duties that he referred to collectively as the “grunt work.”

“Those first few years, I was going out and getting to know people,” he told BusinessWest. “My father always impressed upon me, from the beginning, that you have to go out and establish your network, the people you’re going to be doing business with — the people, as my father used to say, that you’re going to be in the trenches with.

“So the first few years were filled with inserting myself into circles of attorneys, accountants, bankers, insurance people — those we work with often — and just making friends with them and creating a network,” he went on.

“There was a lot of driving around, pulling up to businesses, knocking on doors and saying, ‘I’m Brendan Greeley with the R.J. Greeley Co. — I just want to let you know that we’re out there and that, if there’s anything you need with commercial real estate, give us a call.’ There was a lot of going to lunches, playing in golf tournaments, and just … being out there.”

This grunt work has certainly paid off over the years, as the Greeley company has continued its run of success, even during times of stress and duress for the commercial real-estate industry, which is still coping with many lingering effects from the pandemic.

“When I came into the business, a manufacturing building was $50 a square foot, and now, it’s commonly $100 a square foot or more. To build new would be $200 a square foot.”

Foremost among those is the sea change in the office market, which has definitely slowed since the pandemic and has seen vacancies increase as remote work impacts whether companies will renew leases, as well as how much space they take if they do renew.

“Firms are creating opportunities for people to work at home, and that has certainly created some shifts in the office market,” he said. “We have some big chunks of office space that are available or coming available; as leases expire, people are renewing for less space, and that adds up to more inventory.”

This shift is certainly countered by a tightening on the industrial and distribution side of the ledger, where fewer properties are coming on the market and those frequented by ‘for sale’ or ‘for lease’ signs are not on the market for long, and for obvious reasons.

“There are far fewer construction projects taking place in this market because of higher interest rates, and this obviously helps with the value of existing inventory,” Greeley said, citing the laws of supply and demand. “The alternative is to build new, and building new is going to be very expensive.

“When I came into the business, a manufacturing building was $50 a square foot, and now, it’s commonly $100 a square foot or more,” he went on. “To build new would be $200 a square foot.”

As for the value of commercial properties — a huge issue in most major markets and communities of all sizes in the wake of COVID — Greeley said that, by and large, most properties in the region are holding their value, but this ability is being sternly tested by rising interest rates.

“Someone can afford to pay less for an investment property if they’re financing some portion of the transaction,” he explained. “So I would say that investment real estate has deflated some, although the quality inventory seems to be holding value better than the lesser-quality inventory.”

 

Bottom Line

Looking ahead, Greeley said his company will continue to do more with less in terms of office staff, but continue to look for growth opportunities.

This could include hiring an additional broker or perhaps more, he said, adding that he is always looking for good fits. Meanwhile, the firm is looking at opportunities on the property-management side of the ledger and on the development side as well.

“I have an open mind for opportunities that may present themselves in the future,” he said. “I’m always looking at ways to grow.”

Not bad for someone who never gave much thought to working at the family business growing up — and is now the owner of the family business.

STCC Creates Career Opportunities for Non-traditional Students

By
Academy’s Pathway to Cybersecurity program at STCC.
Special Coverage Technology

Inside the IT Academy

Academy’s Pathway to Cybersecurity program at STCC.

April Bellafiore teaches the IT Academy’s Pathway to Cybersecurity program at STCC.

The IT Academy at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) is a “life changer” for Juan Burgos.

Echoing comments from other students enrolled in the IT Academy at STCC, Burgos said he’s excited to be working toward certifications that are tickets to good-paying jobs in the cybersecurity industry. Students in the first cohort, held this spring, are enrolled for free, supported by a grant.

“This opportunity came up, and I jumped on it,” Burgos said one Wednesday afternoon at STCC, where he was seated in a classroom with the other students. “This is a life changer. This is going to change everything.”

Launched on March 12, the IT Academy’s Pathway to Cybersecurity program at STCC supports non-traditional students who are new to information technology (IT) and computer technology. They are learning skills that set them up for entry-level IT careers. Students also have the option of moving into the two-year Cybersecurity program, which can lead to an associate degree.

The comprehensive curriculum combines theoretical knowledge with practical, hands-on experience. The program includes a part-time option running classes three evenings a week for nine months. A summer and winter boot camp will be offered that runs for 10 weeks (full-time day program), which allows students to attend classes five days a week.

Eventually, students who follow the cybersecurity track will use the Richard E. Neal Cybersecurity Center of Excellence in Springfield, scheduled to open later this year. The facility will serve as a dynamic hub for advancing cybersecurity awareness, education, innovation, and battling global security threats.

“This opportunity came up, and I jumped on it. This is a life changer. This is going to change everything.”

The 6,000-square-foot facility will include a cyber range, which is a simulated training environment, and security operations center, which is envisioned as a support service for Massachusetts municipalities, as well as regional businesses, to detect cybersecurity events in real time and respond quickly.

STCC offers a number of training opportunities through its Workforce Development division, from a free program that prepares students to be paraeducators in Springfield to the Hampden Prep program, which provides basic computer skill training.

“We are excited to offer a wide range of training programs that help non-traditional students pursue their dream careers,” said Gladys Franco, assistant vice president of Workforce Development at STCC. “Our goal is to make it easier for people looking to get started in a career. We’re particularly excited about the IT Academy, which provides a pathway to build a career in IT and cybersecurity. It’s a growing field with many opportunities.”

 

Immersive Education

Students in the Pathway to Cybersecurity program are learning in person in a classroom taught by April Bellafiore, Cruz Antonio Pagan, and Andrew Collins, a professor for the Cybersecurity program at STCC.

Students also participate in interactive computer training labs focused on obtaining CompTIA certifications, which are industry standards that IT professionals can use to demonstrate their knowledge and skills to potential employers.

The training is “beginner-friendly,” Bellafiore said. The course provides students with skills to be successful in the Cybersecurity program and in the workforce.

Students enrolled in the course come from a variety of backgrounds. Shelby Kiendzior graduated from STCC with a degree in dental hygiene and worked in the field, but plans on changing her career.

“We are excited to offer a wide range of training programs that help non-traditional students pursue their dream careers.”

“I will be getting four certifications in different IT-related courses,” Kiendzior said. “This course will set me up for where I want to go in IT or tech.”

Luz Padilla, who hails from Puerto Rico, called the IT Academy “the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

She added, “I love computers. I love troubleshooting, and I would like to work in homeland security someday. The class is amazing. The teacher’s great. I got a lot of encouragement from everybody here, especially Miss April.”

She was referring to Bellafiore, an instructor who has taught in-person and online courses for more than 20 years.

“I am excited to work with the IT Academy students to prepare them for a dynamic and exciting industry,” Bellafiore said. “We also encourage students to continue their education and apply for the STCC Cybersecurity two-year degree program. In today’s digital age, every industry relies on IT expertise. It’s a growing field with many rewarding and diverse job opportunities.”

Weight Loss, Miracle Medications, and the Workplace

By Contributor
Law

Gainful Employment

By Abby M. Warren, Esq. and Virginia E. McGarrity, Esq.

 

Whether you are picking up a well-respected periodical or a celebrity newsmagazine, you cannot avoid reading about semaglutide injection drugs — drugs used to control blood-sugar levels for individuals with type-2 diabetes and weight loss.

‘Ubiquitous’ is the only word to describe the news coverage of these ‘miracle medications.’ As news has spread about these medications, their use has expanded far outside of Hollywood to individuals across the country, ultimately leading to a reported shortage. So, what impact, if any, does weight, weight loss, or the spread of such medications have on the workplace?

 

Weighty Considerations

First, studies have long concluded that discrimination based on appearance, including weight, occurs in employment and other areas of life and that it may disproportionally impact a specific group or groups of individuals. Likely in response to such evidence, effective Nov. 26, 2023, New York City passed a law protecting individuals who live in, work in, or visit the city from discrimination based on their height or weight regarding employment, housing, and public accommodations.

While New York City may be an early adopter of such a law, there may be more jurisdictions that follow this trend. Further, on the federal level, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has long taken the position that height and weight are generally unacceptable pre-employment inquiries as they may disproportionately impact employees of different protected characteristics. In short, weight has always impacted the workplace, including workplace decisions.

Second, there may be harassment or workplace bullying related to appearance, including weight. Harassment, whether sexual or based on other protected characteristics, can involve comments or actions related to the physical body and appearance. The same is true of bullying and targeting in the workplace. In today’s climate, where millions of employees are being prescribed or taking weight-loss drugs, this may include employees asking questions of a co-worker who has lost weight, asking whether a co-worker is taking a weight-loss drug, making judgmental statements, stigmatizing such individuals, and similar behavior.

While harassment and bullying related to appearance may not be new, such treatment based on the perception that an employee may be taking a weight-loss drug could be a more recent area with which human resources must grapple.

Third, workplace culture may be impacted by the recent focus on weight and weight-loss medications, and the level of such impact may depend on several factors. For example, the employer’s geographic location, the industry, the overall focus on health and wellness in the workplace, and the employer’s commitment to inclusivity and belonging may all impact how weight and height will be viewed, including using such weight-loss medications.

In light of these workplace considerations and the attention that these weight-loss medications have received in recent months, a number of employers have opted to implement clinical lifestyle programs and personalized weight-loss management plans. The goal of these programs is to reduce the number of employees who might benefit from weight-loss medications like Wegovy.

To the extent employers have control over their healthcare coverage (fully insured plans are typically subject to state insurance laws and individual determinations made by insurance carriers), the decision of whether to cover these weight-loss medications is a challenging one. While these drugs have potential for long-term improvement in the health of employees and can drive future cost savings for the health plan, the cost of covering them today may not align with budget constraints and sustained increases in healthcare spending over the long term.

For example, the current list price of Wegovy is more than $1,300 per month, and most patients take it indefinitely to maintain their weight loss. North Carolina recently announced it would no longer cover Wegovy and other similar weight-loss medications for its employees, estimating that such continued coverage would cause premiums to double for all employees (not just those who are taking the medications). While it is difficult to determine how many private-employer health plans are covering these weight-loss medications, it does not appear that such coverage matches the rampant surge in popularity these medications have experienced in the past year.

 

Advice for Employers

At this juncture in history, where celebrities, media, and the American public are hyper-focused on weight, including weight-loss medications, what actions can employers consider?

First, it is essential to continue fostering a positive and inclusive work environment that extends to weight, height, body shape, and appearance. Trainings, policies, town halls and education, and other visible commitments to such inclusivity can all support such a culture.

Second, businesses should establish specific training of managers, supervisors, and individuals involved in recruiting and hiring about weight and height discrimination and bias (including studies that have demonstrated the existence of this bias), and how these employees can foster an inclusive work environment, and remove any relevant barriers that may exist.

Lastly, employers may wish to review their current culture, policies, and benefits to determine if the employer is supporting the health and well-being of employees and their health journeys, and whether there are potential areas of improvement.

 

Abby Warren and Virginia McGarrity are partners at Robinson+Cole in Hartford, Conn. Warren is a member of the firm’s Labor, Employment, Benefits, and Immigration Group, while McGarrity is a member of the Employee Benefits and Compensation Group.

MiraVista Expands with New Adult Inpatient Treatment Beds

By Contributor
Healthcare News

Meeting a Need

 

MiraVista Behavioral Health Center recently announced the expansion of its facilities with the opening of new adult inpatient treatment beds. These adult beds are in addition to the 16-bed adolescent unit which was recently renovated and now reopened.

The addition of these specialized beds reflects MiraVista’s ongoing commitment to meeting the growing demand for high-quality mental-healthcare services. With mental-health challenges on the rise globally, the Holyoke facility recognizes the importance of providing comprehensive and compassionate care to individuals with mental illness.

“We believe that everyone deserves access to effective treatment in a supportive environment, and these new beds will enable us to provide specialized care to more individuals in need.”

“Our decision to expand our inpatient treatment capacity underscores our dedication to serving our community and the Commonwealth and addressing the increasing need for mental-health services,” said Shelley Zimmerman, MiraVista’s hospital administrator. “We believe that everyone deserves access to effective treatment in a supportive environment, and these new beds will enable us to provide specialized care to more individuals in need.”

The new adult inpatient beds will offer a range of therapeutic interventions tailored to meet the unique needs of each patient. MiraVista’s multi-disciplinary team of experts, including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and nurses, will work collaboratively to develop personalized treatment plans focused on promoting healing and recovery.

In addition to individualized therapy sessions, patients will have access to group therapy, medication management, recreational activities, educational workshops, and peer support, all designed to foster personal growth and empowerment. MiraVista’s holistic approach to treatment emphasizes wellness and resilience, empowering patients to achieve lasting positive change in their lives.

Direct admission without first being seen in an emergency department is a new process MiraVista introduced with the reopening of its adolescent unit.

 

Hope and Support

MiraVista also recognized May as Mental Health Awareness Month with a flag raising on May 9 and by illuminating its façade green.

“Green is used for the month to symbolize hope and support for individuals living with a mental illness,” said Kimberley Lee, chief of Creative Strategy and Development. “Our clinicians work across populations to help patients successfully manage their mental-health challenges and lead fulfilling lives in community.”

In conjunction with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) observance of the month, Lee explained, MiraVista will highlight on its social media the diverse mental-health needs of various populations and encourage people to wear green.

“These 31 days are about advancing better understanding of mental health as a component of overall health and the importance of seeking evidence-based treatment for it when needed,” she said. “Whether someone is navigating personal challenges or extending empathy to others, this month holds significance for us all in showing support for mental healthcare.”

Lee said MiraVista will follow SAMHSA’s suggested weekly themes in highlighting the mental-health needs of older adults, children and teens, marginalized racial and ethnic groups, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+ and, as a result of bullying and discrimination, are at high risk for mental-health conditions.

“We are amplifying our efforts during May to destigmatize mental health, enhance understanding, and cultivate a supportive environment,” Lee said. “Promoting mental health and treatment for it benefits everyone — from the individual managing it to the family and friends who love them, to the community in which they live and contribute.”

Bulkley Richardson Celebrates a Century of Commitment to the Community

By
Law Special Coverage

Firm Resolve

Sean Buxton was talking about why he chose to join the Springfield-based law firm Bulkley Richardson, and what he’s found since he came on board not quite a year ago.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” said Buxton, who handles general commercial litigation and is currently doing a lot of work in the firm’s new office in Greenfield, referring specifically to being around — and being mentored by — seasoned attorneys with decades of experience.

“Just in the Litigation department alone, we have Sandy Dibble — I can’t even tell you how long he’s been practicing — and Mike Burke, too; they’re such valuable asssets,” he said. “In the legal field, you get this feeling sometimes that the problem you’re coming on is something you’re seeing for the first time and that no one’s ever dealt with this before. To have someone to go to and have them say, ‘that same exact circumstance hasn’t happened to me, but here’s what my instincts say’ and ‘here’s what I’ve experienced,’ that is so valuable.

“You can bounce ideas off so many people here and make sure that your decisions are informed not only by you and what you’ve learned, but by the instincts and experience of everyone around you,” Buxton went on. “And they’re just fascinating people; we have Judge [John] Greaney here, who sat on the Appeals Court and the Supreme Judicial Court, and Sandy as well; the stories they tell and the experiences they can relate … they’re great mentors.”

While the names of the older lawyers and mentors may have changed, and the exact words used to describe their impact may have changed as well, generations of lawyers who have worked at the firm have been saying pretty much the same things as Buxton.

“You can bounce ideas off so many people here and make sure that your decisions are informed not only by you and what you’ve learned, but by the instincts and experience of everyone around you.”

And that’s just one of many things the firm is celebrating as it marks its centennial this year in what could be described as quiet, poignant fashion (we’ll get back to that in a bit).

It’s taking place at a time of change in the business landscape, such as the rise of the cannabis industry, and at a time when many firms are smaller or have been merged into larger entities. Meanwhile, the firm’s ongoing commitment to the community has become a focal point of the centennial, said Managing Partner Dan Finnegan, who came on board in 1992.

“We wanted to celebrate all of the amazing work that has gone into supporting, celebrating, and engaging in the communities in which we live, work, and play through initiatives such as helping to feed the hungry and addressing food insecurity, supporting arts and culture, contributing funds to lifesaving healthcare and research organizations, and providing pro bono legal services to those in need, among many, many others,” he explained. “Members of the firm have contributed time, resources, and finances to help so many worthy causes over the past century, and we plan to continue that legacy.”

Dan Finnegan

Dan Finnegan says the firm’s commitment to the community has become a focal point of its centennial celebration.

Elaborating, he said the firm has launched a new campaign called ‘Be the Change.’ It will connect lawyers and staff with opportunities to engage with organizations in Western Mass. and beyond so they can act together to bring positive change.

The campaign was launched last fall, with a team of 50 from the firm taking part in the annual Rays of Hope breast-cancer walk. Other specific initiatives include a YMCA clean-up day on May 3, when attorneys and staff rolled up their sleeves and helped prepare Stony Brook Acres, a YMCA camp in Wilbraham, for a June opening; partnering with Greater Springfield YMCA to assist area boys and girls attend summer camp (the firm will send 16 youth campers to a YMCA-run camp this summer for one week); and a $10,000 donation to Baystate Health to purchase infusion chairs.

“Giving back to the community is one of the core values that differentiates us,” said Peter Barry, who joined the firm in 1982 and preceded Finnegan as managing partner, adding that this is one of many qualities and traditions that essentially go back to 1924.

For this issue and its focus on law, BusinessWest takes a look at 100 years of tradition, expansion, innovation, entrepreneurship, and giving back — and at how these traits will continue to define the firm moving forward.

 

Making Their Case

When asked how Bulkley Richardson intends to celebrate its centennial — beyond ‘Be the Change’ — Finnegan suggested that the annual holiday party “might be a little more robust this year.”

In most respects, though, it will be business as usual.

And it has been this way since 1924, when R. DeWitt Mallary became associated with the law firm of Frederick Wooden and Harold Small, located in an office at 387 Main St. in Springfield, several blocks south of where the firm is headquartered now, in Tower Square. Eventually, the firm would become Wooden, Small & Mallary.

Peter Barry

Peter Barry says the firm has had a noticeable impact on Springfield and surrounding communities over the years.

Mallary would later partner with Morgan Gilbert to form Mallary & Gilbert, and in 1934, J. Bushnell Richardson, a graduate of Springfield’s Central High School, Amherst College, and Harvard Law School, would join them, and in 1947, the firm became Mallary, Gilbert & Richardson.

In 1950, the firm was reorganized, with the law practice conducted in collaboration by two separate partnerships — Mallary & Gilbert, and Richardson Dibble & Atkinson, adding Norris Dibble and Robert Atkinson as partners. The firms practiced together in shared office space.

Fast-forwarding through the middle of the 20th century, Richardson Dibble & Atkinson merged with the firm of Gordon, Bulkley, Godfrey and Burbank in 1956, and the firm was renamed Bulkley, Richardson, Godfrey and Burbank. A year later, Robert Gelinas joined the firm, and in 1964, Godfrey left to form a partnership with Edwin Lyman. Matthew Ryan Jr., elected as district attorney, a part-time office in those days, joined Bulkley, Richardson, Godfrey & Burbank soon thereafter. And with Burbank’s departure in 1972, the firm was renamed Bulkley, Richardson, Ryan, and Gelinas.

In 1978, the district attorney’s role became full-time, and Ryan left the firm, whch was renamed Bulkley, Richardson, and Gelinas. By 1983, the firm consisted of 27 attorneys and was occupying a suite of offices at Baystate West, which later became Tower Square.

It is still there and recently renewed its lease, said Finnegan, so it will be there for a long while to come. Meanwhile, the firm recently opened a Greenfield location (it also has one in Hadley), and now consists of 40 attorneys and more than 30 staff.

“We work hard, and we provide quality service, but we’re pretty good at work-life balance and understanding that folks have to have lives outside of the office.”

That brings us to today, when the firm is marking what have remained constants through all those changes to the letterhead over the past 100 years — especially quality service to a wide array of clients across dozens of different specialities, and an environment where generations of lawyers have, as Buxton noted, worked together and mentored those new to the profession.

It is also marking change, including the contunuing expansion of its practice areas — there are now 32 of them, Finnegan noted.

“We’ve always been a full-service law firm, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in the area,” he said. “And we’ve always been able to provide a wide array of services to clients.”

Within those 32 practice areas there have long been specific strengths, such as health law, said Barry, noting that the firm has long represented many of the region’s larger providers, as well as education, representing several colleges and universities.

Bulkley Richardson’s leaders say the firm was built on excellence and has maintained it through the decades.

But there have been important additions to the portfolio over the years as well, he went on, citing the broad realm of cyber law and service to the growing, changing cannabis industry as just two examples.

 

Continuing a Legacy

Barry, who has been with the firm for 42 of its 100 years, joined it just before it relocated from State Street to Tower Square, a big move and a rather large risk for the partners at the time, he said, adding that downtown Springfield was a much different place at the time.

And the firm has been involved in many of the changes that have taken place since, representing entities ranging from the Basketball Hall of Fame, which built its new home just over 20 years ago, to the Springfield Redevelopment Authority, which presided over the renovations that brought Union Station back to productive life after nearly 40 years of dormancy, to the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, which operates the MassMutual Center.

“It’s nice to be able to drive around and say, ‘we were involved with that,’” Barry said, adding that the firm has also represented the Westover Metropolitan Development Corp. in its many endeavors in Chicopee and Ludlow and countless other clients as well.

Like Finnegan, Barry said many changes have come to the field of law and the firm over the past few decades, let alone the past century — everything from the demise of law libraries, with all that material now online, to the advent of depositons and other legal functions via Zoom.

What’s probably more important is what hasn’t changed — and won’t change, they said, especially the firm’s commitment to excellence as well as the environment that Buxton described earlier, one where lawyers and staff with wide ranges of experience and knowhow work together to generate positive results for clients while learning from each other.

In fact, both Barry and Finnegan used similar words and phrases to describe those who mentored them when they arrived four and three decades ago, respectively.

“I’ve had a lot of great mentors here,” said Barry, noting that he and others now serve as mentors to the younger atttorneys.

Finnegan said the firm has created a strong culture, one that has promoted many lawyers (he’s one of them), and staff members as well, who then spend their entire careers at Bulkley Richardson.

“That’s a testament to the culture of the firm,” he said. “We work hard, and we provide quality service, but we’re pretty good at work-life balance and understanding that folks have to have lives outside of the office.”

Looking ahead, Barry and Finnegan said the business plan is rather simple. It calls for continued growth and building upon the solid foundation laid in 1924.

“We’ve made a commitment to growth. Within the past few years, we’ve hired quite a few young lateral attorneys, as well as several attorneys right out of law school,” said Finnegan, adding that the firm has what he calls a rather robust summer associate program (he was one himself) that has served to help keep talent flowing through the pipeline. “We have a lot of young lawyers that we’ve hired over the past few years.”

“Overall, the firm has long managed to maintain an important mix of older attorneys, those in the middle of their careers, and those just joining the profession,” said Barry, adding that such a mix is critical to the ongoing success of any law firm.

Finnegan agreed, noting that this quality is one of many that have defined the firm since Warren Harding was in the White House, and will continue to do so moving forward.

“When I got here, the word I always heard was ‘excellence’ — this firm was built on excellence,” he said. “The firm has always been a collection of exceptional lawyers providing top-quality legal services to our clients. I don’t think that’s ever changed over the 100 years the firm has been in existence, nor is it going to change moving forward.”

Gándara Center Tackles Mental Health and More with Cultural Sensitivity

By
Gándara’s Family Resource Centers
Healthcare News Special Coverage

Breaking Down Barriers

Gándara’s Family Resource Centers

Gándara’s Family Resource Centers each provide a number of services for families in one location.

 

There’s no doubt, Lois Nesci said, that the COVID years triggered or exacerbated a lot of mental-health issues, which makes the multifaceted of Gándara Center more important than ever.

At the same time, the pandemic’s impact on mental health also got more people talking than ever before — and that’s good for everyone.

“The need has increased, absolutely,” said Nesci, Gándara’s CEO. “But at the same time, as we continue to break the stigma around mental health, people become more and more willing to discuss some of their struggles or ask for help. We as a society have been educating people: what are the signs people exhibit if they’re not doing well, if they’re depressed, anxious, or struggling with substance abuse?”

To help those who fall into those categories, as well as many others, Gándara’s services fall into five buckets:

• Behavioral health, which encompasses a broad array of clinical and substance-use services for adults, families, children, and adolescents, including individual and group psychotherapy, diagnostic assessments, and treatment;

• Youth, young-adult, and family services, including children’s behavioral health, foster care, and youth and young-adult residential ​homes;

• Substance use and recovery, with services include recovery coaching, peer recovery centers, and long-term residential treatment for men, women, and young adults with substance-use disorder and co-occurring mental-health disorders;

• Community and prevention, including health-education programs and initiatives that provide resources and information addressing numerous public-health areas while representing the multicultural needs of the region; and

• Intellectual and developmental disability services, which promote the health and well-being of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and those with behavioral health and/or substance-use disorders.

Gándara’s mental-health services — its most robust collection of offerings — focus on a few key areas: outpatient behavioral-health clinics, children’s behavioral health, substance-use and recovery services, and adult community clinical services.

“As we continue to break the stigma around mental health, people become more and more willing to discuss some of their struggles or ask for help.”

“Gándara has always had a mission to help people at the grassroots level,” Nesci said. “We’re in communities where people live. We’re accessible and very visible. We provide the linguistic ability to meet people where they’re at, and the staff reflects the population we serve.”

As a multi-service organization with a geographic footprint statewide, Gándara targets many of its programs at specific populations, such as recovery programs for Hispanic individuals and a residential group home for LGBTQ+ youth, Nesci noted. “Gándara has always responded to individual needs in the community.”

 

Five Decades of Growth

According to its website, Gándara Center was founded in Springfield in 1977 to advocate and provide for equal, culturally competent behavioral-health services for the Hispanic community.

The 1970s saw a large wave of Hispanic migration to the Greater Springfield area, and the portion of newcomers who had mental-health and substance-use issues had limited access to services that could help them.

Lois Nesci

Lois Nesci says mental-health needs have increased, but so have the conversations around them.

Fortunately, in 1977 — and later, as a part of President Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 — funding was made available to communities across the U.S. to address the mental-health needs of individuals suffering from serious mental illness, including the elderly as well as racial and ethnic minority communities.

The city of Springfield submitted a citywide application that included needs in both the Hispanic and African-American communities. This funding strengthened the city’s mental-health services and aided the Gándara Center, whch was named after Dr. José Gándara Cartagena, a prominent physician and public servant from Puerto Rico who dedicated his life to providing services for those who could not afford medical care. He also advocated for urban renewal, especially the construction of much-needed new public housing.

Gándara Center was first housed in a storefront on Main Street in Springfield and then on the Mercy Hospital campus on Carew Street. In 1982, when the center opened an outpatient clinic on Main Street, it was the only agency in the area specifically providing culturally sensitive care to the Hispanic community.

In the early years, Gándara’s first executive director, Dr. Philip Guzman, laid the foundation for what the agency would later become. In 1982, Dr. Henry East-Trou joined the team as a supervisor for the agency’s psychiatric day treatment program. At the time, Gándara had just one Springfield location and approximately 50 staff to house all of residential, outpatient, and substance-use programs. Over the years, the agency secured numerous contacts and grants, expanded services, created additional programs, and increased staff size.

In 1989, when East-Trou began shepherding Gándara Center through an unprecedented era of growth as executive director, the agency employed 100 people and served approximately 2,000 individuals.

“We’re in communities where people live. We’re accessible and very visible. We provide the linguistic ability to meet people where they’re at, and the staff reflects the population we serve.”

After 30 years of service, East-Trou retired in May 2019. Throughout his tenure, he further expanded the agency and its services, which by that time offered behavioral-health, substance-use, prevention, and educational services to more than 40 communities throughout the Commonwealth, employed more than 900 staff, and served nearly 13,000 adults, children, and families from all backgrounds.

Gándara’s foster care program

Gándara’s foster care program has been placing youth in temporary, safe, therapeutic home environments for more than 30 years.

In 2020, Nesci joined the agency and assumed the role of CEO, bringing experience working with individuals from all races and ethnic backgrounds. In her time at the agency, she has led several relocation projects, program expansions, and agency-wide accreditation from the Council on Accreditation.

Today, around 1,100 Gándara employees serve more than 17,000 clients at more than 100 locations.

“We have a full complement of behavioral-health services delivered in community-based clinic settings, as well as our home behavioral-health services for youth and families,” Nesci said. “We’ve expanded and grown our in-home services to include hospital diversion for youth. In addition to that, we also provide services for people who are struggling with substance abuse. We have six recovery centers statewide, and then we are also providing recovery coaching to individuals in the community who are in recovery.

“I’ve been here almost four and a half years,” she added, “and during that time, I’ve seen our services grow in a lot of areas, particularly in the area of substance-abuse services, our youth services, and our behavioral-health services to children and adults.”

The organization’s footprint has also grown, expanding into the Berkshires, Fitchburg, Falmouth, and Worcester, to name a few more recent locations.

 

Starting the Conversation

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, but Nesci wants critical conversations to happen year-round.

“There was a time when mental health was something that was never discussed,” she said. “People didn’t understand it; therefore, they feared it. Subsequently, they made judgments about it.”

Participants in Gándara’s PhotoVoice educational campaign

The Problem Gambling Prevention: Youth and Caregivers Photovoice 2.0 program provides youth with leadership skills and knowledge to become change agents in their community, committed to raising awareness and prevention of underage gambling.

Though stigma still exists, she added, plenty of progress has been made to break down those barriers, and Gándara’s focus on cultural competency is part of that.

“When we started talking about mental health being just as important as physical health, it began to change the rhetoric around providing safe spaces for individuals to be able to get services.

“It’s very important to have a space that’s judgment-free,” Nesci continued. “When an agency like us meets people where they are in the community, as recovery coaches or with behavioral-health therapy in their homes, speaking the language of individuals, understanding cultural backgrounds, people feel welcome. They don’t feel judged. They feel like someone understands them.”

And that builds trust and relationships, which she calls the greatest catalyst for people to make needed improvements in their lives — which has, after all, been Gándara Center’s mission for almost 50 years.

Non-compete Agreements May Be in Jeopardy

By Contributor
Law Special Coverage

Challenging the Rule

By Trevor Brice, Esq.

 

On April 23, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a final rule banning non-competition agreements for all employees. While this action by the FTC was expected, there were many unanswered questions about the final impact of the non-compete rule in regard to existing non-compete agreements and its scope as applied to future non-compete agreements. These questions were answered under the final rule as promulgated.

 

Most Non-competition Agreements Banned

The FTC’s final rule banning all non-competition agreements is effective 120 days after its publication in the Federal Register. As of the effective date, all non-competition agreements are banned, with close to no exceptions, except for franchisor/franchisee relationships and for sales of a business between buyer and seller.

Independent contractors are also included under the umbrella of employees that would no longer be subject to non-competition agreements under the final rule. This would effectively mean that many employees in industries such as film, finance, and other professional services now have the right to switch between employers, which the FTC states “will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to the market.”

Trevor Brice

Trevor Brice

“The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already vowed to block the rule, calling it ‘an unlawful power grab’ and arguing that the authority to govern non-competition agreements should be left to the states.”

However, and of note, the FTC does not have jurisdiction over nonprofit employers, so non-competition agreements are enforceable in this regard despite the FTC’s final rule.

 

Final Rule Retroactive as to Lower-wage Workers

In addition to prohibiting all non-competition agreements after the effective date of the final rule with limited exceptions, the FTC’s rule is retroactive, prohibiting certain non-competition agreements before the effective date of the rule as well.

Existing non-competition agreements can remain in effect as to senior executives, which are defined in the rule as employees in ‘policy-making positions’ making at least $151,164 per year. Existing non-competition agreements with employees who do not meet this definition are no longer enforceable per the final rule.

Despite the final rule, employers do not need to modify existing non-competition agreements by rescinding them. Employers do, however, need to notify their workers that the employer will not enforce non-competition agreements in the future. The FTC has included in its final rule model language for informing employees of this change, which can be communicated through email, text, or in paper format.

The final rule does not generally impact non-disclosure agreements or non-solicitation agreements unless they prohibit a worker from seeking or accepting work or operating a business. Employers should be aware that more restrictive state laws governing non-competition agreements remain in effect.

 

Challenges to Final Rule Looming

As of the announcement of the FTC’s final rule, challenges are already looming. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already vowed to block the rule, calling it “an unlawful power grab” and arguing that the authority to govern non-competition agreements should be left to the states.

The statement issued by the Chamber of Commerce goes on to note that, “since its inception over 100 years ago, the FTC has never been granted the constitutional and statutory authority to write its own competition rules. Non-compete agreements are either upheld or dismissed under well-established state laws governing their use.”

This announcement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will undoubtedly lead to other challenges through the court system. Indeed, a Dallas-based global tax-services and software provider has already filed suit against the Federal Trade Commission over the impact of the final rule.

The FTC, as the Chamber of Commerce rightly points out, has no authority to write its own competition rules. The FTC can, however, make rules if it goes through the proper rule-making process, including introducing proposed legislation and leaving it open to comment for a certain amount of time, which did occur here.

However, even following this process does not ensure that the rule will stand. The rule still remains open to court challenges from the Chamber of Commerce, individuals, or organizations affected by the rule or any other stakeholders within the final rule. This could mean that changes would be on the horizon for the rule, and possibly a narrowing of its already expansive application.

 

Takeaways

As noted, the FTC’s final rule is already being challenged through the court system, and a challenge from the Chamber of Commerce will most likely follow suit. Therefore, if an employer has existing non-competition agreements, the employer may not need to rescind them just yet.

Further, if employers are intending to enter into non-competition agreements that are reasonable and enforceable under existing state laws, other options, such as non-disclosure agreements and non-solicitation agreements, may have to be used, but it would be prudent to wait on further ruling from the existing challenges to the final rule.

In the meantime, consultation with an attorney will aid in navigating the changing landscape of non-competition agreements.

 

Trevor Brice is an attorney who specializes in labor and employment-law matters at the Royal Law Firm LLP, a woman-owned, women-managed corporate law firm certified as a women’s business enterprise with the Massachusetts Supplier Diversity Office, the National Assoc. of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms, and the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council.

MHA Launches New Community Support Program

By Contributor
Health Care Special Coverage

Toward Their Best Life

 

The Mental Health Assoc. (MHA) recently announced the launch of its new community support program (CSP), which is part of its BestLife Clinic.

The program aims to help individuals who are facing social, economic, and environmental factors that significantly impact their ability to access healthcare and live independently. CSP is a mobile, short-term (three to six months), intensive case-management service that helps clients who are dealing with unemployment, food insufficiency, transportation, and housing issues.

CSP services are available to individuals who have been diagnosed with a mental-health, substance-use, or co-occurring disorder. To qualify for these services, individuals must have had either a psychiatric hospitalization discharge within the past six months, multiple emergency-room visits within the past 90 days, or documented barriers to accessing and consistently utilizing essential medical and behavioral-health services. Clients must be at least 18 years old and actively enrolled in therapy, and they must be residents of Hampshire or Hampden county and not receiving other case-management services.

“The services they provide allow for our clinicians, recovery coaches, and medication prescribers to focus on their main tasks of providing therapy, peer support, and treatment, while they also serve as another set of eyes helping to monitor our participants’ needs and overall well-being.”

“Community support programs are very important for our participants as well as for our other service providers, such as clinicians, recovery coaches, and medication prescribers,” said René Piñero, vice president of Behavioral Health and Clinical Operations. “The services they provide allow for our clinicians, recovery coaches, and medication prescribers to focus on their main tasks of providing therapy, peer support, and treatment, while they also serve as another set of eyes helping to monitor our participants’ needs and overall well-being.”

Clients who qualify will work with MHA’s behavioral-health case managers to improve their overall lives by developing their daily living skills and helping them access critical resources such as benefits, housing, and healthcare. Clients will also receive assistance with accessing recovery-oriented peer-support groups and temporary assistance with transportation to essential medical and behavioral health appointments.

CSP services are available via community outreach, telehealth, and in-person. MHA accepts referrals through its Central Intake Department and accepts MassHealth and some insurances. To get in touch, call (844) 642-9355 or email the BestLife Clinic at [email protected].

MHA provides access to therapies for emotional health and wellness; services for substance use recovery, developmental disabilities, and acquired brain injury; services for housing and residential programming; and more. Its goal is to provide person-driven programming to foster independence, community engagement, wellness, and recovery.

40 Years of the Workplace

By
BusinessWest Anniversary

The Pendulum Has Shifted — Maybe for Good

Allison Ebner recalls that, when she first entered the workplace just over 30 years ago, the overriding question still concerned what the employee could do for the employer.

Over the years, and especially over the past decade, the pendulum has certainly shifted to where it’s now more about what the employer can do for the employee.

Indeed, while there have been cycles with the economy and the job market — and, thus, times when the employer and employee have alternated when it comes to having the proverbial upper hand, if you will — the employee has been in control for a while, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

“It’s been flipped on its head, and I don’t think it’s necessarily going to flip back that much moving ahead,” Ebner said. “As employers, we’re constantly trying to figure out ways to retain top talent, and I think that is something we’ll see continuing into the future.”

This is just one of many changes that have come to the workplace over the past four decades, and especially the past four years, as the pandemic created a new paradigm. Others involve everything from how people work and where to dress codes; from technology and the emergence of AI to how to maintain a company culture when people are all together maybe, as in maybe, a day or two a week.

Drew Andrews, managing partner and CEO of the accounting firm Whittlesey, touched on many of these trends and issues as he flashed back almost exactly 40 years to when he started with the firm in June 1984.

“There was one computer in the corner of the office; it was a desktop that no one knew how to use. I was the bright, young kid who came out of college and somehow took a course my senior year on how to use that software, Lotus 1-2-3,” he recalled. “I was the only one who knew how to use it, so they had me start to train people on how to do spreadsheets on it. It was so slow and so ineffective that I can remember partners saying, ‘we’ll never be using this … I can do in 10 minutes what you just did in an hour.’”

Meanwhile, he was doing this work in a three-piece suit. “My first day, it was about 85 degrees out, and I’ve got this suit and tie on, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘why am I doing this?’” he recalled. “I was thinking that I should have taken the summer off and worked at the beach.”

Flash ahead to late last month, and he was doing this interview with BusinessWest via Zoom, from his home, wearing an unbuttoned collared shirt, and marveling at just how much things have changed — not just since he was that kid fresh out of school, but since the start of this decade.

And he’s certainly not alone.

Indeed, one of the common threads running through the stories in this 40th-anniversary issue is the dramatic changes that have come to the workplace in recent years, what they mean, and what might come next.

Allison Ebner

Allison Ebner

“It’s been flipped on its head, and I don’t think it’s necessarily going to flip back that much moving ahead.”

Many of those we spoke with have been working for three or four decades and referred to themselves as ‘old timers’ or even, in one case, a ‘dinosaur.’

And while some admit to being a bit stubborn when it came to those changes that have come in realms from relaxed dress codes to remote work, in almost every case, reason — driven by many factors, but especially the need to attract and retain talent — has won out over stubbornness.

“I’m a suit kind of guy,” said Tom Senecal, chairman of Holyoke-based PeoplesBank. “And it’s taken me a while, but the pandemic changed things. People wanted to go to casual; I said ‘no,’ but finally acquiesced. Then they wanted jeans on Friday, and I acquiesced. And then they wanted jeans every day, and I acquiesced, and it hasn’t really changed.

“I acquiesced on all of them,” he went on, “because who wants to go work at a stodgy, old-perceived institution versus one that’s flexible? I’m competing against tech companies and insurance companies and financial-services companies. You want to wear jeans? You want to work at home? I have to compete, so I have to acquiesce to what the market is doing.”

Moving forward, Ebner and others are seeing some slight movement toward returning to the office, or at least strong efforts in that direction. What they don’t see is the pendulum (meaning that upper hand) swinging back to the employer any time soon.

 

Is This Work in Progress?

As he talked about all the changes that have come to the workplace, Andrews put things in poignant perspective when he said he would prefer to visit his firm’s three offices, scattered across Northern Conn. and Western Mass., on Monday or Friday, because there are noticeably fewer people on the road those days courtesy of hybrid work schedules and a desire to be home those days.

His own employees are among those who fall into these categories. “So, if I went on Monday or Friday, I’d be visiting myself,” he said with a laugh.

Drew Andrews

Drew Andrews

“I was the bright, young kid who came out of college and somehow took a course my senior year on how to use that software, Lotus 1-2-3. I was the only one who knew how to use it, so they had me start to train people on how to do spreadsheets on it.”

So he winds up visiting toward the middle of the week, when people are around — at Whittlesey and most other larger places of business across sectors and jobs in which hybrid schedules are feasible.

And that’s a large list, said Ebner, noting that, while profound changes have come to the workplace since the pandemic arrived in 2020, there were already shifts in those directions years before COVID. The pandemic simply accelerated the process, and on many levels.

Also, the period just after the height of COVID became one of the most competitive in recent memory when it came to talent, the shortage thereof, and the lengths that employers would go to attract talent and then retain it.

“Employers pulled out all the stops to keep their people and attract talent, in terms of raising wages, enhancing benefits, and working on ways to keep their people happy,” she said. “It’s settling down just a little bit; we’re seeing a little bit of a cooling on wages — increases for 2024 were not predicted to be as high as they were in 2023 — and benefits are scaling back, especially in terms of employers sharing the increased cost of healthcare. And some of the other benefits around wellness have gone away.

“We’re trying to find that next normal,” she went on, acknowledging a dislike of the phrase ‘new normal.’ “And we’re still settling into that; we’re trying to find the right balance of productivity expectations for employees versus what we’re offering — the employee value proposition. What does that look like?”

Meanwhile, the workplace has changed in other ways, again mimicking society in many respects.

Today, Ebner said, it’s a less tolerant place than it was years ago, with co-workers becoming seemingly less willing to accept points of view — on a wide of topics — other than their own.

“There’s a lack of respect in our workplaces today for ideas, thoughts, basically anything that someone has that differs from yours,” she explained. “There’s a very confrontational undertone in our workplaces today.

Tom Senecal

Tom Senecal

“You want to wear jeans? You want to work at home? I have to compete, so I have to acquiesce to what the market is doing.”

“The congenial tone of our workplaces where we were more accepting of people who don’t think and do things like us has really diminished, and it’s causing a lot of chaos for employers trying to manage a respectful workplace,” she went on, adding that this chaos has manifested in everything from microaggressions — stealing coworkers’ lunches and messing with their workstations — to sharp rises in requests at EANE for conflict-resolution training and coaching for people who can’t get along.

 

Remote Possibilities

Certainly, the biggest change to come to the workplace involves fewer people being in the workplace day in and day out.

We all know what happened. COVID forced most people to work remotely, and over the course of weeks that eventually turned into months, people found they liked it, and they were, by and large, just as productive. And when it came time to go back to the office, many weren’t ready to do so. At least not every day.

Over the past few years, remote work and hybrid schedules have ceased being a perk, if that’s even the right word. They became a demand, or an expectation.

As noted earlier, this was not the first preference for the old timers, who came into a world where everyone worked 9 to 5, or something close, and couldn’t work remotely even if they wanted to, because the technology wasn’t there.

It’s certainly there now, and in recent months, two camps have seemed to develop, at opposite extremes.

“There’s a camp on one side that says everyone has to be in the office, and there’s no remote work, and they don’t want to offer any flexibility. And then, you have the other group that says everyone should be virtual, and if you’re not virtual, you’re not a modern employer,” said Ebner, adding that there is room in the middle and one size (or two) does not fit all.

Meanwhile, many of those who recognize this middle ground still believe something important is missing when people are not in the office, even a few days a week.

Dave Glidden, president and CEO of Middletown, Conn.-based Liberty Bank, said his institution has largely solved the issues involving productivity when it comes to remote work. But he worries about culture and the overall development of younger team members.

“When I came up, I don’t know how many times I sat in the conference room and listened to grizzled veterans talk about problem commercial credits and about how you go to market,” he recalled. “That learning was invaluable to me as I came up, and there are now fewer opportunities for young people coming up to experience that.”

As a result, the bank puts great emphasis on ways to maintain culture when people are not in the office every day, because of its importance to the institution’s overall well-being. Initiatives include everything from professional-development programs to outings where teammates can come together, such as a recent ‘bring your kid to work day’; from food trucks and ice-cream trucks to an all-employee gathering at Mohegan Sun.

“I’ve always said that if a company has no culture, it has no soul, and it takes years to build a good culture,” Glidden told BusinessWest. “But you can lose a culture in minutes or 30 days, you really can.”

Andrews agreed.

“Going back to 1984, my seat was outside the boss’s office; just listening to how he talked to clients … I learned so much,” he recalled. “I was a 21-year-old kid; all I knew how to talk to was other 21-year-old kids. Listening to how that person was interacting with clients and handling situations … I just learned from that.

“I’ve been saying this for a while … we as leaders need to get people back into the office more, and for the right reasons — not just to sit there and talk with people who are remote,” Andrews went on. “We have more fulfilling days when we’re together.”

 

40 Years of Technology

By
BusinessWest Anniversary

Welcome to an Exciting, Uncertain New World

On Jan. 22, 1984, a good deal of the U.S. watched — for the only time, because it never aired again — a commercial that was, in many ways, more interesting than the beatdown the Los Angeles Raiders were putting on the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl XVIII.

Directed by Ridley Scott, the spot, titled “1984,” used dystopian imagery to introduce Apple’s Macintosh personal computer, which would hit stores two days later, with the promise of allowing the average person access to the kind of computing power formerly reserved for big corporations.

The world would never be the same. The home computer was already a thing — it was, in fact, Time magazine’s ‘Machine of the Year’ in 1982 — but the Macintosh introduced a wave of innovation and ease of use that eventually made computers ubiquitous in both homes and businesses — for better (productivity) and, arguably, worse (a pervasive blurring between work and home life).

The latter, of course, became possible with the rise of the internet, email, and, later, social media.

“The internet has completely changed how we work, how we communicate, how we conduct business, how we learn, how we consume entertainment, and a million other aspects of our daily lives that have become so normal, we have forgotten that, 30 years ago, they didn’t exist,” said Delcie Bean, CEO of Hadley-based Paragus Strategic I.T., adding that technology is still changing things, in ways that feel unstoppable.

“If we step back and truly think about just how much changed as a result of the internet and we look at how quickly it happened,” he went on, “AI is going to have a much bigger impact in a much shorter amount of time.”

And that will require the kind of nimbleness and ability to pivot that Sean Hogan has demonstrated through his entire career, since launching Hogan Associates (later Hogan Communications and now Hogan Technology, based in Easthampton), with an initial focus on cabling and infrastructure.

“We saw the ethernet becoming a thing, and everyone needed wiring; there was no networking back then,” he told BusinessWest. “For six or seven years, we did strictly cabling. We ran it up and down the East Coast; we had a ton of work.”

After surviving the recession of 1989-90, Hogan began to see telecommunications as a huge opportunity, and that became his first major pivot.

“Back then, very few companies had voicemail. People hate it nowadays, but they wanted it then. So we started selling phone systems that could integrate with computers and voicemail. We did very well selling phone systems, started getting attention from bigger companies, and ended up selling the Toshiba name. That brand gave us recognition. As a company, we built a great base of clients; we were thinking phones would never go away.”

Delcie Bean

“If we step back and truly think about just how much changed as a result of the internet and we look at how quickly it happened. AI is going to have a much bigger impact in a much shorter amount of time.”

About 16 years ago, Hogan began to move toward its current IT management model — which, these days, focuses on managed security as much as anything else, to respond to ever-growing cyberthreats. “The help desk is still critical, but if you’re not secure, that’s the biggest problem.”

And in the next few decades, companies like Hogan’s will have to keep adapting, because opportunities, challenges, and threats in the IT world certainly will.

“We’ve been able to keep educating ourselves enough to know that we have to be willing to change and accept change as an opportunity,” he said. “We totally believe that’s our culture here. We change when we have something new to learn. We consider ourselves security fiduciaries for clients. We protect our clients to the best of our ability; that’s our number-one job these days.

“Thirty years ago, we’d say we’d provide a solid ethernet foundation and a good network infrastructure,” Hogan added. “We’re still able to do that. But if you’ve got a bad network cable, that’s one thing; if you’ve got CryptoLocker or some other ransomware, that’s a huge threat to your business.”

 

Breaking the Mold

Joel Mollison, president of Northeast IT in West Springfield, shares a similar story of adaptation and evolution.

“When we started 21 years ago, the market was referred to as ‘break and fix’: if something breaks, we fix it,” he said, adding that he might do some network troubleshooting or provide very basic antivirus solutions, but in general, the work was sporadic.

Sean Hogan

Sean Hogan

“We change when we have something new to learn. We consider ourselves security fiduciaries for clients. We protect our clients to the best of our ability; that’s our number-one job these days.”

Around 15 years ago, Northeast switched to the model of a managed service provider, providing ongoing services under contracts, doing more diligence for each client. “We created the ability to form long-term relationships with clients, understanding their networks and providing them with hardware and other services, and also networking equipment.”

The Great Recession impacted the IT world, and many businesses were just trying to stay afloat and weren’t necessarily investing in their systems, Mollison recalled, but as brighter economic times re-emerged, managed services and IT tools had become more sophisticated, with more integration across platforms, automated monitoring services, and more complex cybersecurity tools, and businesses of all kinds were increasingly recognizing the need for them.

“Things have escalated in terms of the veracity and tools used by the threat actors; they have better tools and techniques,” he explained, noting that businesses need to combat online threats not just by installing protective technology, but by training employees to recognize increasingly sophisticated phishing schemes, which promise to become more realistic and targeted in the AI era.

“A lot of this has been driven by insurance — cyberliability policies dictating that businesses must have certain elements,” Mollison noted. “We get handed policy affidavits to review what’s installed. But it’s a good conversation piece, a chance to talk about where they’re at and where they can make some progress.”

Bean, who launched a solo business fixing home computers in 2002 and now boasts a growing team of 65 employees, made his own important pivot around 2011, choosing to focus only on commercial clients at a time when residential work still represented 60% of his revenue.

It has proved to a successful decision, as more businesses have realized they need a partner like Paragus (or Hogan, Northeast, or other regional IT players) at a time when, as noted earlier, networks and cybersecurity are becoming more complicated.

“Even the large Fortune 100 companies rely on consultants and experts and advisors because this field is just so broad, and it’s touching businesses in so many ways,” Bean said. “It takes a team of experts with a lot of different experience. Even we are constantly leaning on experts and outside advisors and doing research because it is just such a broad field, and it’s changing so quickly.”

Joel Mollison

Joel Mollison

“Things have escalated in terms of the veracity and tools used by the threat actors; they have better tools and techniques.”

Mollison said there’s a reason his firm has become more security-centric than ever. “We’ve had customers come to us who have experienced a breach, dealt with ransomware, lost hundreds and hundreds of hours while the whole rebuilding process took place. They couldn’t produce anything, there were legal fees, information was compromised. A lot of those factors are at play.”

Indeed, 20 years ago, smaller businesses didn’t have much to worry about when it came to aggressive cyberattacks, but experts agree that everyone is a target now.

“The thing that’s going to cause some chaos for everyone is the introduction of AI,” Mollison said, citing Microsoft Copilot — an AI-powered tool that automates features for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams — as one example of opportunity married with concern.

“If you’re allowing a system to comb through documents, you know there might be some bad intentions,” he told BusinessWest. “In the wrong hands, somebody could gather a lot of information that could be detrimental to your organization or turn into a security vulnerability, with espionage potential. We’re going to see a lot more AI-generated attacks in the future.”

And AI isn’t going anywhere, Bean said — with all its benefits and potential worries.

“I hate really dire predictions like, ‘if you don’t do this, you’re going to be out of business,’ but in this case, I think it’s right,” he said, adding that AI could be as transformative as the internet started to become 30 years ago. “And I’d like you to name how many businesses you know that don’t use the internet in any way, shape, or form. I would imagine it’s going to be zero.”

Therefore, “if you’re not having those conversations yet, asking those questions, talking to partners, going to webinars, getting informed and educated, I think you’re starting to fall behind,” Bean added. “There’s still plenty of time, but there won’t be for that much longer. I think now is the time for CEOs and C-level staff to really get engaged, to ask questions, to get educated, and to start to figure out where this fits into their business’s strategy and life cycle before they get left behind.”

 

Future Shock

Hogan has long recognized the growing importance of cybersecurity and its continuing evolution.

“Fifteen years ago, small companies weren’t a target. You had viruses isolated to desktops, but now, everyone’s a target,” he said — and AI will only complicate matters. “You see the bad actors out there that use AI to do deepfakes, do all sorts of bad things. We’re already seeing AI with voice recognition, duplicating voices on the phone. I fear for seniors out there. I’m afraid that’s going to be an issue.”

But AI poses great opportunity as well, Bean said, especially with the emergence of predictive AI.

“It’s going to be based on your specific niche industry, where it’s going to be able to run models and simulations and solve problems within your business or give you hypothetical outcomes to new products or things that you’re thinking of developing,” he explained. “We haven’t quite seen that hit the masses yet, but it’s coming in the next 18 months. And that’s what we need to be prepared for.”

Bean cited Moore’s law, a long-standing observation in the IT world that the number of possible transistors in a computer chip doubles every two years or so.

“This is going to be exponentially faster,” he said. “We are going to see that apply to innovation, where what used to take a decade has already been cut in half a handful of times, and now happens in 12 to 18 months. Soon, that will become six months, and then three months, and then we are going to reach a point where things are changing so quickly that, for a while, it is going to be very difficult to manage until we find some kind of equilibrium and things stabilize — or we find a new normal.”

This brave new world will be a far cry from what we were seeing in 1984 (to cite the titles of two classic dystopian works), but businesses that specialize in IT will have to do what they’ve always done: keep pivoting, keep learning, keep adapting … and keep their client businesses from being overwhelmed by the next big thing.

40 Years of Professional Services

By
BusinessWest Anniversary

In Law and Accounting, It’s a Different World

When Rudy D’Agostino entered the accounting profession back in 1985, there was what they called the ‘Big 8.’

These were the very large firms that dominated the industry at the time — Arthur Anderson, Arthur Young, Coopers & Lybrand, Deloitte Haskins and Sells, Ernst & Whinney, Peat Marwick Mitchell, Price Waterhouse, and Touche Ross.

“Everyone wanted to work for the Big 8 firms, and there was enormous competition for those jobs,” said D’Agostino, a partner with Holyoke-based Meyers Brothers Kalicka, who got his start at Coopers & Lybrand.

After a series of acquisitions, the Big 8 is now the Big 4 (Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler, and PricewaterhouseCoopers), fewer accounting graduates want to work for those giants, and … well, there are fewer accounting graduates in general, a challenge for firms of all sizes.

These are just some of the many changes that have come to the sector, and professional services in general, said D’Agostino and many others we spoke with, who highlighted everything from the way people work to the way people dress to the way firms market themselves — something they couldn’t do in the legal profession, other than the phone book, until 1977. And in accounting, getting Fridays off during the summer, or at least Friday afternoons, has become the norm as firms’ staffs look to recover after a long, seemingly never-ending tax season.

Overall, the biggest change is in how people communicate and a resulting faster pace to the work, said Amy Royal, founder and principal with the Springfield-based Royal Law Firm. She noted that, when she broke into the field in 2000, most correspondence was still by mail. Now, the postage machine sees less use seemingly every month, and very little is actually done by mail.

Instead, much more is being done by email and phone, specifically the cellphone.

Indeed, Royal remembers walking into the office once maybe 15 years ago, and noting, with alarm, how infrequently the office phone had been ringing of late.

“I said to my office manager, ‘do we have a problem? — our office phone isn’t ringing as much,’” she recalled, noting that, after some perspective, she was simply recognizing a trend — people were finding other ways to reach out. And they were doing so at seemingly all hours of the day and night.

Indeed, modern communications technology allows people to reach their accountant or lawyer at any hour, said Jeff Fialky, managing partner of the Springfield-based law firm Bacon Wilson, and, increasingly, they’re doing just that.

Meanwhile, there have been other changes in these fields, including consolidation, especially in accounting, said Patrick Leary, a principal with the Springfield-based firm MP CPAs, noting that many of the smaller firms doing business in the ’80s, ’90s, and earlier this century have been merged into larger firms, a reflection of a broader trend in business.

Jeff Fialky

Jeff Fialky

“We’ve seen substantial consolidation in the banking environments. We have larger and larger and fewer and fewer banks, and the same consolidation across the service industries.”

There are several reasons for this, including the rising costs of technology and retiring Baby Boomers, he noted, but one of the biggest is something that probably couldn’t have been imagined in 1984 — the deepening challenge of finding and retaining talent.

Accounting was never a ‘sexy’ profession, and modern technology has only made it slightly more so, said Leary, adding that this reality, coupled with the fact that a fifth year of college is now required to become a CPA, is leaving fewer people interested in entering the field, at the same when most Baby Boomers are on the doorstep of retirement, if not there already. This has led to firms boosting salaries and sending more work overseas.

Efforts to recruit more students into the field have become a topic of conversation and concern among CPAs and industry groups, said D’Agostino, and greater reliance on internship programs as feeder initiatives.

It’s the same with clerking programs in the legal profession, said Fialky, adding that, overall, law-school enrollment is down, and many firms face challenges with keeping talent in the pipeline.

 

Case in Point

It’s not exactly what you would call a pressing matter — not like some of those other challenges mentioned above — but one of the challenges facing law firms today is deciding what to with their libraries.

Once an important part of any firm’s operation, they are now all but obsolete, used by only the occasional old-timer now that every piece of information available in those books and journals can be found online, said Royal, adding that, at most firms, law books are decoration — and an enduring background for photos.

Fialky agreed, noting that the demise of libraries is just one of many changes to the profession. Others include the now-24/7 nature of the work, the desire among clients for information immediately — not the next day or even in a few hours, as was once the case — and even the work that lawyers are doing, work that reflects shifts in the market and also movement toward lawyers being more generalists than they are specialists.

Amy Royal

Amy Royal

“For a long time, I resisted putting my cell phone on my business card. Post-COVID, that became a necessity, and now people will just call me on my cell or text because they know they can get me.”

“I’m a transactional attorney; 25 years ago, transactional attorneys were not handling M&A transactions and purchases and sales and private equity,” he said. “That’s something we’ve seen become more prominent, especially in our market, over the past 15 years or so, as we’ve seen these maturing, multi-generational companies that have contemplated their outcome being that it’s a matured asset, and their contemplating sale to, in many circumstances, a private-equity-funded purchaser.

“And this has certainly changed the marketplace,” Fialky went on. “We’ve seen substantial consolidation in the banking environments. We have larger and larger and fewer and fewer banks, and the same consolidation across the service industries — not only in law, but in accounting, architecture, landscape architecture, and other sectors.”

But perhaps the biggest change to come to this sector involves technology and how it has changed the pace of work.

Royal noted that lawyers have never exactly been 9-to-5 professionals, and now, they are far less so, with calls, texts, and emails coming at all hours of the day, and with those on the other end expecting an immediate reply.

“For a long time, I resisted putting my cell phone on my business card,” she said. “Post-COVID, that became a necessity, and now people will just call me on my cell or text because they know they can get me.”

Fialky agreed. “The pace has increased precipitously; the volume of correspondence has increased exponentially. In the course of a day, it’s not uncommon, at least in my experience and in my practice, to receive hundreds of correspondences, and those are texts, calls to my cell phone, calls to my hard line, and more, and a lot of that is transferred direct to attorney.”

 

Adding Things Up

As he talked about his profession, Leary said it was never just about adding up numbers and being a proverbial ‘bean counter.’

There was always a consulting component to the work, he said, adding that now, there is much more of this kind of work, as software has taken over some of the tasks handled with the old calculator that still sits on his desk but is rarely used.

Patrick Leary

“It’s fascinating what you can get involved with in public accounting today, whether it’s forensic accounting or foreign taxation issues and so forth.”

“Today, most businesses, regardless of size, have some accounting software, so you’re getting information from them that’s already compiled and put together, so they’re relying on us for more strategic analysis of those numbers,” he explained. “You’re not questioning whether two plus two equals four; now it’s ‘let’s see what four means.’

“It’s a higher level of skill than what you needed before,” he went on, adding that this shift is one of many to come to the industry.

Another is how the work is done. Indeed, years ago, said D’Agostino, much more time was spent with the client, in person. Today, there is still some face-to-face interaction, obviously, but much more is done by Zoom or over the phone. And those face-to-face meetings are much different.

Leary agreed.

“If we were going to audit ABC Company, we’d back up last year’s paper files and head over there,” he said. “You would spend a couple of weeks with a client, meeting with them, going through their records, pulling invoices, and doing reports. You’d spend a few weeks there — which I really liked, being out of the office, meeting with clients — and building that relationship. And you got a workout because you’d be hauling loads of paper. Today, you’re going out with your laptop, and you’re not necessarily going out to see clients.”

Still another change to come to this field, as noted earlier, is the fact that fewer people are choosing to enter it.

“The accounting field has been experiencing a decline nationally because people who are driven by numbers are leaning more toward the software industry,” Leary said. “And the profession is certainly looking to change that; you can have an excellent career in accounting, because it goes well beyond simple bookkeeping. It’s fascinating what you can get involved with in public accounting today, whether it’s forensic accounting or foreign taxation issues and so forth.”

Rudy D’Agostino

Rudy D’Agostino

“It really hit home during COVID, and it has only continued since — there are just not enough professionals coming into the workforce.”

D’Agostino agreed. He noted that the required fifth year of college, compensation that is less competitive than some other fields, and a general interest among young people for something sexier than what they perceive accounting to be has led to what is becoming a critical problem for the industry.

“It really hit home during COVID, and it has only continued since — there are just not enough professionals coming into the workforce,” he told BusinessWest. “So accounting firms have to think outside the box to get things done — and also to keep professionals here, which has necessitated being creative, compensation increases, and, with some firms, outsourcing work to other countries.”

One initiative that has helped put young professionals in the pipeline at MBK is an internship program, D’Agostino went on, adding that the firm has four or five interns that come on board annually, and maybe one or two of these will join the firm when they graduate.

“That’s a way to introduce students to the work they will be doing and get them into our firm,” he said. “And we have a pretty good success rate.”

Despite this success, workforce issues will continue into the future, said those we spoke with, creating a greater reliance on technology, automation, and, increasingly, AI to get the work done, leaving accountants with more time to do analysis and consulting.

“There are routine tasks that will get taken over by AI, such as data entry, which can be automated to some extent,” Leary said. “And that provides the time and the tools to analyze data for clients much better. Rather than spending your time keying in data, you’re taking a hard look at it and understanding what those numbers are telling you.”

 

Bottom Line

When asked to look ahead and project what might happen next within the legal sector, Royal started by saying that, if she was asked that question 25 years ago, she could not possibly have predicted what her world would like today.

That’s a world where most meetings are conducted by Zoom, where lawyers and accountants work remotely in some cases and wear jeans to work when they’re not in court or visiting clients, where the office phone doesn’t ring nearly as much, and where clients’ names come up on cellphones at 10 p.m. — and even 3 a.m.

This is the new reality for those in professional services, she said, joking that maybe what will come next is a shift back to the way things were.

That is certainly not likely. What is likely is that law libraries and those old-fashioned adding machines will become more obsolete and more office decoration than anything else.

 

40 Years of Nonprofits

By
BusinessWest Anniversary

Increasingly, They Operate as an Ecosystem

The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts has been funding the work of charities and nonprofits across the region since 1991. And its overriding mission hasn’t changed.

What has changed, at least recently, is how CFWM accomplishes that mission — specifically, moving away from specifically targeted grants into a more trust-based model. Instead of seeking to put some dollars toward a specific goal, the foundation gives to organizations in a way that puts them at the center of it and allows them to dictate how they want to spend their money.

“It’s a recognition that funders don’t necessarily know what’s best for nonprofits,” said Megan Burke, the organization’s president and CEO. “It’s the people on the front lines who are dealing with constant change in the community who know the best places to use those funds.”

The Community Foundation was moving in that direction before the pandemic, but COVID, and the urgent needs it exposed, really accelerated the process, she explained.

“If we know you have a strong mission, a strong organization, we’ll put the money in your hands and say, ‘use it well.’ We’ll ask afterward how that went, but in the moment, you know what you need to achieve and how to get there.”

Meanwhile, the mission of Square One, which began life in 1883 as Springfield Day Nursery, has in many ways remained consistent for more than 140 years.

“We’re still doing the same type of work, although the world has changed enormously,” president and CEO Dawn DiStefano said. “Children still require care for their parents to go to work. And we’re a company that cares for children and instills confidence in our community that we are a safe, healthy, and high-quality place for young children to learn and be cared for.”

At the same time, she added, much has changed.

“Probably around the time BusinessWest started,” DiStefano said, “we realized something that today is quite obvious — that you can do a lot of work with children all day, but if you’re not in partnership with families and caretakers, you can hinder permanent growth and change. After all, learning happens 24/7.”

Specifically, Square One — it took that name in 2008 to reflect its role as more than just a day nursery, but as a key foundational element in the lives of preschoolers — has made a point over the past few decades to communicate more thoroughly with parents at the start and end of each day about the child’s lessons, experiences, and mood. That way, parents can continue the conversations at home — and, in many cases, start their own, which builds trust between the parents and Square One’s providers.

The organization has gone beyond that level of communication as well, opening a Family Support Services division about 15 years ago, which includes a home visitation program for parents who request it, including specific programs for young, first-time parents and parents in recovery.

Megan Burke

Megan Burke

“If we know you have a strong mission, a strong organization, we’ll put the money in your hands and say, ‘use it well.’ We’ll ask afterward how that went, but in the moment, you know what you need to achieve and how to get there.”

“We see ourselves as partners with families,” DiStefano said. “If we can bring out the best in the child and families, they become productive members of our community, and we all benefit from that. We all do better when folks are able to engage in our world.”

Megan Moynihan, CEO of the United Way of Pioneer Valley, said her organization’s goal since its founding 103 years ago as Springfield Community Chest has been to meet the greatest needs of the region, from early education to food insecurity to financial literacy.

“Post-COVID, we did a community assessment to really understand where the needs in the community are, if they had changed or not,” she said, noting that the greatest needs right now run the gamut from basic services, like food, to financial wellness, housing access, and mental-health support.

It meets those needs through its community service centers, where people can access emergency food supplies but also mental-health resources, including a suicide-prevention hotline. There’s also a financial-wellness program called Thrive, a partnership with Holyoke Community College on career training — in fields like culinary arts and medical assisting — and a host of other outreaches.

“Understanding the pulse of the community is the number-one issue that needs to be addressed,” Moynihan said. “It can be mental health tomorrow, but in 10 years, it might solar power and how to transition to that. We know what today’s needs are, but we have to be responsive to those needs, and when community needs change, we have to change, too.”

 

Come Together

One thing the United Way has done well over time, Moynihan noted, is connecting many resources in the community.

“If someone comes in and they are are housing-insecure, we’ll call one of the outreach workers at Health Care for the Homeless and see what kind of services are out there for them,” she said as one example. “We’ve always been a connector in the community, finding where the needs are and connecting individuals to the services they need. We can’t do the work alone.”

Megan Moynihan

Megan Moynihan

“We’ve always been a connector in the community, finding where the needs are and connecting individuals to the services they need. We can’t do the work alone.”

It’s a philosophy many nonprofits were already moving toward even before COVID — and the way it isolated people and organizations — really laid bare the need to connect and work together as a nonprofit ecosystem.

For example, Burke said, someone might seek job training, but they might also face other barriers to employment, from unreliable transportation to unaddressed health issues, and nonprofits can refer clients to each other to address multiple needs at once.

“A healthy nonprofit ecosystem, made up of nonprofits of all different sizes, is the best way to meet folks’ needs. No single nonprofit can do everything; there are so many different needs,” she told BusinessWest. “So coordination and collaboration with each other is really important.”

DiStefano used the example of connecting a parent of a child at Square One with Way Finders if they’re in need of housing support.

“We serve 1,200 families a year. Most are working one or two jobs, working eight to 12 hours a day, maybe even riding the bus, going to appointments,” she said. “I’m not in the housing business, but I’m not going to say to families, ‘I can’t talk to you about housing.’ That’s a big part of our evolution.

“Society 140 years ago was harsher in its opinion that your family was your business; it really wasn’t the business of social-service agencies or the government to help your family. But as a society, we noted over time that you can ignore problems, but that only costs more money down the line,” DiStefano went on. “The more you can invest in the child, especially between age zero and three, when the brain is doing the most developing, the better off they’ll be. Why not sink every resource we have into making sure the child has the healthiest opportunities in those years?”

The Center for EcoTechnology, which predates BusinessWest by eight years, has certainly been a connector of resources, in its case programs focused on energy efficiency, sustainability, and the environment.

In the years leading up to CET’s founding in 1976, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the establishment of Earth Day saw Americans more focused on environmental concerns, and CET began its work largely in the realm of energy efficiency and home-energy audits. Today, the initial vision is largely intact, but the work has expanded into commercial waste, decarbonization, and recycled building materials.

dawn DiStefano

Dawn DiStefano

“As a society, we noted over time that you can ignore problems, but that only costs more money down the line.”

“We’re still doing energy conservation and energy efficiency. In some ways, we’ve remained true to our origins,” said Ashley Muspratt, the nonprofit’s president and CEO. “But we’ve modernized some of the language and approaches to evolve with the times — for example, shifting the conversation to electrification, which is no longer about just saving energy, but shifting away from fossil fuels to electricity and renewable sources of electricity.”

CET got involved in waste reduction in the 1980s, and that remains a core area of its work today. In addition, it’s more focused now on the question of environmental justice, aiming to ensure that no communities or customer segments are left behind or harmed by the transition to a lower-carbon or no-carbon economy.

“We offer our services in dozens of languages and have made an effort to recruit multilingual staff. We also work with a translation company, so we can provide real-time interpretation on the phone or in the field,” Muspratt added. “We want to make sure we have a staff that reflects and looks like and understands the different communities that we’re trying to serve.”

That hits home for Burke, who noted that the Community Foundation adopted a new strategy a few years ago around diversity and increasing opportunity and equity in the community. To her, that means nonprofits should have staff members that share the lived experiences of clients — not just ethnic background, but, to cite one example, serving people in Franklin County who are living with limited means trying to address all the challenges rural families have.

“Having people on their staff and on their board who may have lived those experiences allows them to develop programs to be more successful,” she noted. “We’ve stressed the importance of organizations really thinking about what perspectives they need on their staff and board.

“And it’s not just so they can feel good or have a great photo that shows diversity; it’s to be more successful in delivering the services they were founded to provide,” Burke went on. “Nonprofits recognize there really is value in incorporating a lot of different perspectives in the work they do.”

 

Thoughtful Evolution

While focusing their work in a more connected way and dealing with, in many cases, greater levels of need, some the region’s most venerable nonprofits have expanded in other ways.

Square One, for instance, has grown its family childcare program, where children are cared for and learn in home settings instead of one of the organization’s centers.

“I predict, in the next 10 years, we’ll see an explosion of interest in family childcare,” DiStefano said. “Some people, post-COVID, found comfort working from home. It’s a great business opportunity; they can make money, and Square One can help coordinate these services, so we’re supporting businesses.”

At CET, Muspratt said the organization has launched a strategic plan to grow its impact by five times by 2030, because, she noted, that’s what the climate needs, and there is plenty of money at the state and federal level to do the work, as well as private funders.

“More and more philanthropic donors want to support climate work, so that pace of growth is possible,” she said. “This region has always had an environmental bent.”

The organization has grown by 20% each of the past two years, with a staff of 100 that could double if the 2030 goals are hit, she added. “We became a more remote organization during the pandemic, and that has helped us cast a wider net. It’s good to have been able to expand our pool of candidates outside the Western Mass. region, though the majority of our staff are still based in Massachusetts.”

Nonprofits also thrive off volunteers; the United Way’s Volunteer Connect program has been successful at, well, connecting area agencies that need help with people who have time and talent to offer. It’s just one more way, Moynihan said, that nonprofits are operating in tandem.

“Everyone is working hard and chasing the same dollars,” she added, “but if we do it together, do it as a community, the outcome is always better.”

40 Years of Manufacturing

By
BusinessWest Anniversary

Companies Still Find Ways to Make It Here

Rick Sullivan calls manufacturing the “invisible backbone” of the Western Mass. economy.

That’s not an adjective he would likely have used 40 years ago, not when the region and many of its communities were dominated by large individual manufacturers or clusters — like GE’s massive transformer complex in Pittsfield, American Bosch and other major players in Springfield, and a still-sizable paper-making sector in Holyoke.

But it works today.

Indeed, while there are still some large manufacturers employing hundreds of people (as opposed to thousands 40, 50, or 100 years ago), this sector is now dominated by smaller players employing maybe a few dozen people each.

And what they’re making has changed as well. While local manufacturing was dominated by firms making tires, matches, paper, and, before that, arms for the U.S. military (at the Springfield Armory) and even monkey wrenches and ice skates, today, they’re making parts for stealth fighters, infrared goggles, medical devices, and other sophisticated products. And soon, in Holyoke, one will be making what is billed as ‘green’ concrete.

“I say invisible backbone because the manufacturing sector in Western Mass., for the most part, is made up of small- to mid-sized manufacturers that are in the supply chains of the larger companies,” said Sullivan, president and CEO of the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council and formerly the long-time mayor of Westfield, one of the region’s manufacturing hubs. “And many of those companies are not situated in Western Mass. or Massachusetts, for that matter; they’re in Connecticut or worldwide.

“And they make important parts for the industry,” he went on. “Back when I was mayor of Westfield, there was $100,000 worth of parts of on every single commercial airplane that went through the city of Westfield, and that has only increased.”

These are some of the shifts that have come to this important sector over the past four decades. Others include a seismic shift in how such jobs are perceived, one that has contributed to a lingering workforce problem, and one that has led to a sea change in how hard companies must work to attract and retain talent — and some initiatives that probably couldn’t have been imagined 40 years ago.

Like ‘Barbecue Friday’ at Boulevard Machine in Westfield.

Susan Kasa, president of that company, which makes parts for the military, aerospace, and outer space, among other sectors, said Boulevard feeds its workers breakfast and lunch each day, and, as that name suggests, it devotes Fridays to barbecuing.

“People will take turns being the chef,” she explained. “We’ll do a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers, but sometimes we’ll go all out and do chicken and other meats; our people really enjoy it. You know it’s Friday because you can smell the barbecue.”

Rick Sullivan

Rick Sullivan

“I say invisible backbone because the manufacturing sector in Western Mass., for the most part, is made up of small- to mid-sized manufacturers that are in the supply chains of the larger companies.”

This new tradition is one of many efforts that fall in the broad category of attracting and retaining talent, she said, with others including everything from advertising open positions in church bulletins to programs to introduce young students to manufacturing and the opportunities in this field — starting with middle school.

“We’re not your grandfather’s shop,” Kasa said, adding that the machinery is both more complex and cleaner, and one ongoing challenge is educating not only young people but their parents about this new reality.

Mark Borsari agreed.

He’s president of Sanderson MacLeod, a Palmer-based maker of twisted wire brushes. That’s not as sophisticated a product as infrared goggles or parts for artificial knees, but is an example of how traditional manufacturing is still making it in Western Mass., although it’s challenging — when it comes to everything from competition for orders to competition for people.

“It’s a different world, a different environment than it was 40 years ago and even 20 years ago,” Borsari said. “It gets down to the perception people have and the pride people have in making things and the importance of community; it’s just different.”

Susan Kasa

Susan Kasa

“Young people have such a bright future in manufacturing, and without incurring all that college debt.”

Like others we spoke with, he said technology, automation, and lights-out manufacturing, where machines run unattended at night, will play ever-larger roles in this sector. But it will always need people, and finding them will continue to be a challenge, especially as the Baby Boomers continue to retire in large numbers.

 

Tradition of Innovation

As he talked about this important sector, Sullivan stressed what hasn’t changed in 40 years or 250 years, and hopefully won’t change moving forward — that manufacturing is a source of what economic-development leaders have long called ‘good jobs at good wages.’

That is, the kind of jobs every region and every community wants and compete tooth and nail to get — and retain.

This region has always had a strong tradition of manufacturing and innovation — Sullivan said those words are essentially interchangeable — that goes back to the Springfield Armory and even before that. And it continued with the production of everything from firearms to toys; from automobiles and trolley cars to textiles; from home appliances to buggy whips, products that even gave some area communities their nicknames.

Many of these items are no longer made here (although trolley cars are again with the arrival of CRRC). In their place, manufacturers are making parts for jet liners, lunar landers, and the SpaceX rocket. But they also making timing chains for automobiles in the case of U.S. Tsubaki in Holyoke and Chicopee, and fasteners for the roofing industry in the case of OMG in Agawam.

“The manufacturing base in the region still runs the gamut,” said Sullivan, adding that this diversity is certainly a positive, with communities no longer dependent on one company or one sector (Westfield, for example, once home to several buggy-whip manufacturers, suffered greatly with the invention of the automobile).

Mark Borsari

Mark Borsari

“You can’t have culture when you have people transitioning every two or three years to chase the latest and greatest thing.”

Overall, the sector is smaller and much more invisible, a trait that emerged as many jobs in manufacturing went south or overseas — Bosch closed in 1986, for example — movements that prompted many to question the sector’s viability, contributing to today’s workforce challenges.

Those we spoke with said there has been some progress from efforts to introduce young people to the field, from initiatives like Barbecue Fridays to the rising cost of higher education and a willingness to look at fields that don’t require advanced degrees.

“Young people have such a bright future in manufacturing, and without incurring all that college debt,” Kasa said. “That debt is getting way out of hand, and rising interest rates aren’t helping. These kids going to vocational schools, and they can be an entrepreneur; they can make six figures and be an integral part of the community. So we’re really working to educate parents about this.

“Not every student is cut out for a college degree, and meanwhile, four years is getting them nowhere in this day and age,” she went on. “Having the vocational education does so much more for these kids, and there’s such a future in it.”

She said showing young people where the parts made at Boulevard are going — into the SpaceX rocket, for example — generates enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, valuing employees and cultivating a strong sense of team are also important, she said, not just with breakfast and barbecues, but by creating a culture, building camaraderie, and even grooming the next generation of leadership for the company.

Borsari agreed, noting that building a team and creating a winning culture are some of the things that haven’t changed over the years.

“Years ago, a good business realized they had to have talented people who could add value to their business feel well-compensated to stay with them,” he explained. “It’s the same today, but the difference is that, a lot of times, the high compensation and all those things need to be there before people can demonstrate that they have value.

“And you see that everywhere,” he went on. “You see that in companies with very little longevity; there’s no culture left. You can’t have culture when you have people transitioning every two or three years to chase the latest and greatest thing.”

Overall, Borsari said the culture he and his team have created — one where people enjoy working well together — is perhaps the company’s greatest competitive advantage because such a culture is less common than it was years ago.

“It’s pretty simple stuff, really,” he said. “It’s a refusal to take the cheap way out and at the end of the day, and it’s doing right by the people who count on us to treat them like we would want them to treat us.”

 

Bottom Line

Looking ahead, Sullivan repeated his oft-stated view that this region needs a growth strategy, one that will emphasize both the lower cost of living here and the strength and diversity of the local economy in an effort to convince more young people to stay — and more people from outside the region to find the 413.

And manufacturing is a big part of that story, he said, adding that the innovation that has defined the region for hundreds of years lives on in this sector.

You can’t look up a passing jet fighter out of Barnes and see the parts made here, said Sullivan, but they’re there. Just like this all-important component of the region’s economy.

 

40 Years of Higher Education

By
BusinessWest Anniversary

Colleges Adapt to Non-traditional Realities

At the recent ceremony that officially installed him as chancellor of UMass Amherst, Javier Reyes noted that attitudes about higher education are changing, while rapid advancements in technology, with artificial intelligence at the center, are forcing colleges and universities to find new ways to meet their obligations.

“How does higher education respond to these challenges?” he asked. “How do we meet the needs of today’s students — students who are increasingly mobile and more agile? How do we meet the needs of a changing society? How do we remain nimble and adapt so that our students are prepared to be active and engaged members of their communities today, tomorrow, and for decades to come?”

That’s a lot to unpack, but UMass will focus on six key areas, Reyes explained: education, research and creative activity, translation and knowledge transfer, engagement, inclusivity and wellness, and financial and operational viability.

Then, importantly, he added, “it is important to stress that these are not six independent areas. Rather, they are six interconnected areas that must work in synergy with each other to achieve our goals.”

It’s a theme of connectivity that … well, connects Reyes’ thoughts with the conversations BusinessWest had with three other area higher-education leaders as they considered how academia has changed over the years — and where it’s going next.

“There’s been an evolution in higher education,” Elms College President Harry Dumay said. “About a decade ago, we knew there was a demographic cliff coming up for traditional undergraduate students. So everyone was thinking about the non-traditional population. And Elms had a strategy of partnering with community colleges to create degree-completion programs, which was very successful in growing enrollment in college through non-traditional students.”

John Cook, president of Springfield Technical Community College (STCC), said the role of his institution has become more prominent with last year’s launch of MassReconnect, which makes community college in Massachusetts free for adults over age 25 — another example of how colleges are prioritizing non-traditional students.

“We’ve become even more essential,” Cook said. “The fundamentals of what community colleges offer are even more important, if that’s possible, than they were 40 years ago. Access, opportunity, equity — all the things we talk about in the public sector — are really part of our DNA. And it’s invigorating to be a part of this, especially with MassReconnect, with a different kind of spotlight shining on us that further underpins this value that our name represents.”

Whether attending college right out of high school or returning as part of that older, non-traditional, often career-changing crowd, today’s students are increasingly facing an economy in flux, so they need, more than anything, to learn how to learn, Bay Path University President Sandra Doran said.

“Today’s graduates will have, on average, seven careers — not seven jobs, but seven careers,” she told BusinessWest. “That’s why we’re really committed to the concept of lifelong learning.”

Elaborating, Doran said, “in the past, you’d go to school for four years, then start your career. But that’s not always how higher education works. You might be taking college courses as a high-school student, or between ages of 17 and 24, or, sometimes, when you’re 50 years old. You might be in the workforce and, at the same time, taking college courses. This continuum of being able to learn any time you need to learn — and have the courses and programs available to do that — is really important to your future. And being adept at online learning is absolutely critical.”

Sandra Doran

Sandra Doran

“Today’s graduates will have, on average, seven careers — not seven jobs, but seven careers. That’s why we’re really committed to the concept of lifelong learning.”

In such a different environment from 40 years ago, she added, colleges and universities need to provide pathways, credentials, certificates, and degrees that are adaptable to people at all stages of life, not just those in that 17-24 age range.

“What we used to refer to as a student conjured up notions of sitting at a desk, taking notes, listening to a professor. But that’s not the only way education is delivered anymore,” Doran added. “People can learn forever.”

 

Into the Real World

Students are also training for a work world that’s fiercely competing for top talent — meaning not just graduates with skills, but those able to keep learning on the fly. With that in mind, Elms College recently crafted a strategic plan that emphasizes the core value of a liberal-arts education, experiential learning in the real world while still in college, and innovation.

“The employers of today are really desperate for students who are real-world ready; you don’t have to teach them how to behave in the workforce,” Dumay said. “At the same time, they can think on their feet. They have that critical thinking. A liberal-arts undergraduate education prepares students to think on their feet, articulate their thoughts, work in groups, all the soft skills that employers are looking for.”

At the same time, he said, the Elms has brought flexibility to the forefront, offering non-traditional students everything from remote options to short-term certificates and stackable credentials that will get them into careers, with growth potential, more quickly than in a full, four-year program.

Harry Dumay

Harry Dumay

“A liberal-arts undergraduate education prepares students to think on their feet, articulate their thoughts, work in groups, all the soft skills that employers are looking for.”

The presidents we spoke with also emphasized the importance of offering programs relevant to growth industries, like STCC’s future involvement in the Richard E. Neal Cybersecurity Center of Excellence being built at Union Station in Springfield, or its continued leadership in health sciences (at a time when healthcare deals with persistent staffing shortages), and HVAC and energy systems (as green energy continues its ascent).

“These are really, really helpful programs to have when we map out what the needs are in the workforce,” Cook said, noting that STCC’s School of Health will be renovated in a major capital project.

Doran takes a similar approach. “Bay Path has always been workforce-driven. That, again, relates back to lifelong learning — always being responsive to the marketplace, to employers. We started in 1897 as a business institute, as a reaction to what was needed in the workplace. That commitment to providing employers with a talented, long pipeline of potential employees really is a commitment to our region, and our lifelong learners.”

She, like Dumay, stressed the importance of flexible programs adaptable to the needs of non-traditional learners.

“It’s not one size fits all. Personalized education is a continuing trend,” Doran said. “We know how important it is for students to feel their college experience is valuable and works for them.”

Reyes said UMass intends to strengthen its role as a public research university in the coming years.

Javier Reyes

Javier Reyes

“We must continue to embrace our role as the primary developer of talent in the Commonwealth while ensuring that all of our students — regardless of their discipline — have the core skills, soft skills, and critical-thinking skills that will allow them to thrive in a rapidly changing economy and a rapidly changing world.”

“Fulfilling our role as a premier land-grant public research university will require us to continue to grow our research infrastructure while also expanding opportunities for students across all disciplines and at all levels to engage with research and hands-on learning opportunities,” he said, noting that, in FY 2023, UMass faculty received 1,164 research awards totaling nearly $240 million. “This is tremendous and speaks to the confidence in the research that is happening at UMass Amherst and the impact that our faculty have on the common good.”

In the current academic year alone, he noted, the campus became home to the National Science Foundation’s Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Academic Center for Reliability and Resilience of Offshore Wind, while UMass Amherst became one of just 18 institutions to receive the National Science Foundation’s inaugural Accelerate Research Translation Award, aimed at translating the research conducted in campus laboratories into tangible solutions to real-world problems.

“We must continue to embrace our role as the primary developer of talent in the Commonwealth while ensuring that all of our students — regardless of their discipline — have the core skills, soft skills, and critical-thinking skills that will allow them to thrive in a rapidly changing economy and a rapidly changing world, so that they can succeed and grow in the fields that they choose to be a part of.”

 

Better Days

Going back to MassReconnect for a moment, Cook noted that community-college enrollment had been on a downward trend in the Northeast for a while, but for both the fall and spring of the 2023-24 academic year, STCC saw a double-digit increase in enrollment, and he expects that pace to continue.

John Cook

“We’re not all the way back to pre-pandemic, but we have changed the trend, and we hope to continue to build on that.”

“We’re not all the way back to pre-pandemic, but we have changed the trend, and we hope to continue to build on that,” he said.

“We’ve been through COVID, which were pretty tough years,” Cook added. “When you combine the momentum of a major capital project and MassReconnect and our equity outlook and the fact that we’re the most affordable college in Springfield … these are wonderful fundamentals. It’s a great place to be.”