“New York City is investing billions in workforce development, yet continues to overlook three of its most powerful, scalable, and community-rooted workforce engines.”
An adult education class at the St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library in January 2020. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)
New York City is investing billions in workforce development, yet continues to overlook three of its most powerful, scalable, and community-rooted workforce engines: the arts, public libraries, and the Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP).
Each of these systems already trains, supports, and connects tens of thousands of New Yorkers to opportunity, often more equitably and effectively than traditional pipelines. But all remain structurally excluded from policy frameworks, underfunded in city budgets, and siloed from one another.
To build an inclusive, future-ready workforce system, New York must stop treating these pillars as ancillary and instead embed them as core infrastructure.
The arts as economic infrastructure
The arts are rarely treated as a serious industry, even though they generate over $10.5 billion in economic output and support more than 72,000 jobs each year across performance, design, education, and media. These jobs build transferable skills in communication, project management, and digital production, feeding sectors from tourism to technology.
And yet the institutions that train and sustain this talent, like community arts groups, public schools, and nonprofit cultural hubs, remain chronically underfunded and excluded from workforce strategies.
This exclusion is inefficient. Arts organizations are often the first employers for young creatives and anchor institutions in local economies. But they face late payments, unstable contracts, and a lack of multi-year funding that undermines job quality and limits growth. Recent federal cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) have deepened the crisis, forcing programs to shut down and jobs to disappear. Every dollar lost in the arts weakens not just cultural jobs but also adjacent sectors like hospitality, education, and media.
The Workforce Development Agenda for New York offers a policy path forward: integrate the arts into education, economic mobility, and sector strategies. That means recognizing teaching artists as part of the youth workforce ecosystem, placing young people in SYEP jobs within the arts tied to credentials, and including cultural organizations in digital equity and infrastructure planning.
The arts already contribute to workforce development, it’s time for policy to catch up.
Libraries: public access points to economic opportunity
Public libraries are the most accessible, trusted, and cost-effective workforce entry points in New York City. They offer free internet, resume help, digital skills training, job search tools, and credentialing, without eligibility requirements, stigma, or gatekeeping. For many New Yorkers, libraries are the only doorway into the labor market.
Yet libraries are still misclassified as cultural luxuries. Budget cuts have slashed hours, delayed repairs, and reduced staff, even as demand for their workforce services rises. The loss of federal IMLS funds threatens to eliminate programs that support adult literacy, job training, and digital equity, services that directly advance the city’s economic development goals.
Libraries fill in the systemic gaps. They act as navigators in a fragmented workforce system, helping residents access services across agencies, nonprofits, and programs. The Workforce Development Agenda calls for expanding decentralized Economic Mobility Hubs. Libraries are already doing this work. But without recognition in funding formulas or workforce plans, their impact is capped.
Designating libraries as workforce infrastructure would unlock powerful new outcomes. With modest investment, they could integrate into data systems that track credentialing, job placement, and wage growth. They can also serve as anchors for underrepresented adult job seekers, providing wraparound services in spaces people trust. Libraries are essential, and the city must treat them that way.
Reimagining SYEP as a career pathway
Each year, the Summer Youth Employment Program invests over $240 million to serve more than 90,000 young people—the largest publicly funded youth employment initiative in the country. SYEP is politically resilient, wildly popular, and proven to deliver short-term gains. A 2022 U.S. Department of Labor study found youth selected through SYEP’s lottery earned three times more than peers during the program and were 54 percentage points more likely to be employed that summer.
But by five and nine years later, the benefits vanished. Why? Because SYEP is designed as a summer-only experience, not a structured career pathway. Participants enter, work, and exit—without continued support, credentialing, or connections to longer-term employment.
This approach contradicts the city’s stated goals of building pathways to high-quality, sustainable jobs. The Workforce Development Agenda emphasizes structured choice, longitudinal data, and integration with high-demand sectors. SYEP should be a launchpad, not an island. We must evolve it into a year-round pathway with fall mentorship, winter upskilling, and spring transition support tied to education, apprenticeships, or unsubsidized work. It should align with other youth initiatives like CUNY Reconnect and Career Ready NYC and track long-term outcomes like wage growth, retention, and advancement, not just participation.
In a city where over a quarter of young adults are underemployed or disconnected, we cannot afford a workforce strategy that stops in August. Summer jobs are the beginning, not the end, of career development.
A connected vision for economic mobility
What ties these three systems—arts, libraries, and SYEP—together is not just their scale, but their unique position at the intersection of community, equity, and workforce access. Each reaches people that traditional systems don’t. Each builds real-world skills that are transferable across industries. And each is underleveraged by current policy and funding mechanisms.
We need a more coordinated, data-informed, and equity-centered system. That requires treating the arts as a real industry, libraries as essential infrastructure, and SYEP as a structured pipeline.
These are foundational pillars of a 21st-century workforce strategy. New York City already has the talent, the tools, and the networks. Now it needs the political will and the policy framework to bring them together.
Gregory J. Morris is CEO of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition (NYCETC), the nation’s largest city-based workforce development coalition, representing over 220 organizations.
The post Opinion: Why Arts, Libraries, and Summer Youth Employment Must Be Central to NYC’s Workforce Strategy appeared first on City Limits.
