Page 68 - BusinessWest August 7, 2023

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Easthampton
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Ignite, a two-day professional-development confer- ence scheduled this year for Nov. 15-16 at Aban- doned Building Brewery. The working title for the event is “Humanification in the Age of AI.”
“This year’s topic focus is going to be resilience and collaboration, but collaboration with technology, and specifically around AI,” Belliveau explained, add- ing that she hopes to have 50 to 75 people in atten- dance. “We want to help people move from fear and panic to ‘how is this tool going to benefit my busi- ness?’ There will be some hands-on experimenting and learning with AI.”
Getting Down to Business
The chamber’s WorkHub project is one of many initiatives designed to help spur new business devel- opment and create more vibrancy and jobs, said LaChappelle, adding that, in the post-COVID area, businesses still need support, but often different kinds of support than they did at the height of that crisis.
“During COVID, I thought our city’s response when it came to economic development and what I call Main Street jobs and concerns ... I was proud of the job we did; we all pulled together,” she explained. “Now, our task is ... ‘we’ve made it through; how do we keep the new things going, and how do we help the people who were always there?’
“We’re not back to the walking traffic on Union Street and Cottage Street that we had pre-COVID,” she went on. “What are we going to do to support those businesses? You rise to the challenge in a crisis, but resiliency is the long game.”
Elaborating, she noted that, to create this resil- iency, the chamber and city need to work together to build into the ecosystem long-term educational and capital support. Such work is ongoing, the mayor said, adding that WorkHub is just one example of providing needed support to businesses and entrepreneurs to not only help them maintain what they’ve built, but get to the proverbial next level.
Such initiatives to build resiliency are needed, she said, because over the past few decades, East- hampton has succeeded in inspiring and nurturing entrepreneurship and growing and diversifying its economy.
One Ferry represents one of many successful mill conversion projects in Easthampton.
Staff Photo
That includes a cannabis cluster, if you will, that is adjusting to a new reality in the form of more compe- tition — in this state and from other states — as well as falling profits and even tighter margins, creating a survival-of-the-fittest environment.
“The ones who got in early, and the ones who had the strongest business plans, are fine,” she explained, putting INSA, the Verb is Herb, and others in that cat- egory. “And the ones who came in because they had the biggest dispensary somewhere else and thought they’d put a branch here ... they’ve closed or have cho- sen not to expand.”
Beyond cannabis, the cultural economy continues to thrive in Easthampton, LaChappelle said, noting that many of its old mills have become home to art- ists and art-related ventures, and to residents as well. Meanwhile, the city has been working with property owners on initiatives to improve the mill district.
“We’ve been successful in getting grant money to re-envision and design that mill district and make it
friendlier to the immediate neigh- borhood and see what we can do for walking traffic and safety,” she explained.
“All of the mill owners have been great partners,” she went on, citing the Ferry Street proj- ect, which has seen several of the long-abandoned Hampden Mill buildings re-envisioned and repur- posed, as the latest example of the old mills that gave the city its character finding new life.
Easthampton was able to chan- nel $3.9 million in MassWorks public-infrastructure grants for improvements at Ferry, Pleasant, and Loveland streets to support the One Ferry mixed-use develop- ment initiative, she said, citing this as one example of the city, state, and mill owners working
collaboratively to achieve positive change in the mill district.
Today, the city is working with developer Mike Michon, who also developed Mill 180, and One Industrial Lofts LLC to determine the best course for what’s known as Mill 7, the largest of the eight mills still standing on the property (many have been razed) moving forward.
“It was to be a mixture of apartments and some affordable housing, and other uses, but the affordable- housing process is now years behind,” LaChappelle said. “So he’s looking at some other solutions and mixed use, and we’re helping him do that.”
Housing, as she noted earlier, is the most pressing need within the community. And while there are sev- eral projects planned or already underway — from a new apartment complex on Cottage Street to the 180 units planned for a mixed-used development at the former Tasty Top site on Route 10 (a project called Sierra Vista Commons), to redevelopment of three city school buildings into roughly 70 apartments — there is certainly a need for more, she said.
But clearly, despite its challenges, Easthampton has become a hub of positive activity and progress, in every sense of those words. BW
“Given our student demographic, diversity naturally thrives at AIC, and we must continue to serve this diverse population.”
HUBERT BENITEZ
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Diversity
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BusinessWest
tices, AIC assures that all prospective freshmen applying to AIC will be admit- ted, provided they fulfill certain academic requirements. “We bring more transpar- ency to the process,” she noted. “We at AIC don’t have the same challenges as some institutions, but it’s really important for us to show transparency.”
New Ways Forward
Late last month, the U.S. Department of Education drew more than 100 academics, government officials, and administrators to a National Summit on Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, where discussions touched not only on the post-affirmative- action landscape, but whether there should be change in the practices of legacy admis-
sions and preferences for family members of donors.
According to the New York Times, attendees discussed the importance of developing and expanding tools to achieve diversity beyond race-based admissions, including recruiting through academic- enrichment programs for talented low- income students; improving financial aid; initiating direct admissions, or automati- cally admitting students who have met certain threshold requirements, as AIC has done; bringing disadvantaged students to campus to generate interest; and making
it easier for community-college students to transfer to four-year colleges.
“We’re very committed to access, oppor- tunity, and diversity as the foundation of the institution — it’s who we are,” Cole
said. “We’re always making strategic deci- sions as an institution to make sure we’re able to maintain that, and to support all students moving forward.”
After all, people learn more amid dif- ferent perspectives than in a homogenized environment, she said, and that goes for more than just students.
“I’ve been at AIC since January 2014. I learn things from the student body every year, even every day. It’s really important for folks to learn from each other and have a diverse campus like AIC,” she told BusinessWest. “We’re constantly learning, using different lenses when we looking at problems and issues. There’s a huge ben- efit to diversity on campus.” BW