Identity Is Not a Limitation: Turn Lived Experience Into Leadership Power with Lindsay Green

Leadership isn't just changing. It's evolving in ways we're only just beginning to imagine. And women, we're not playing this game anymore. We're the ones reshaping the entire field, building models, movements, and businesses that serve more than just a few. On the She Leads podcast, you'll hear real conversations with women who've broken through all kinds of barriers, revenue, identity, orders, and expectations.

There's no sugarcoating here, just the truth told by those who are living it. I'm Adrian Garland, entrepreneur, strategist, educator, and creator of live experiences, gathering women leaders together for over a decade. And this is the She Leads podcast.

Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the She Leads podcast. I'm so excited to welcome my next guest. Her name is Lindsey Green, and she is the president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. And she's in charge of deepening and expanding the Navy Yard's mission, investing in jobs of the future, and creating pipelines for underserved communities to fill these jobs. Previously, Lindsay served as chief strategy officer of the New York Economic Development Corporation, where she oversaw economic analysis, business development, inclusive job growth, and innovation strategies.

Just a quick background for everyone. If you don't know, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a not for profit organization that serves as the real estate developer and property manager of the yard on behalf of the City Of New York. The yard is home to 550 plus and growing businesses and employs more than 11,000 people, and it generates over 2,500,000,000.0, with a b, per year in economic impact for New York City. Its history is that it's more than a 150 years old, and it was originally a naval shipbuilding facility. And it launched America's most famous fighting ships, including the USS Maine, the USS Arizona, and the USS Missouri.

Today, the yard's mission is to fuel New York City's economic vitality by creating and preserving quality jobs, growing the city's modern industrial sector and its businesses, and connecting the local community with economic opportunity and resources of the yard. Lindsey, you have a big and important job, and I am so excited to talk to you, to learn about you and your journey, and to hear more about the Brooklyn Naval Yard. So welcome to the She Leads Podcast.

Thank you, Adriana. It's exciting to be here.

I'm so happy to talk to you. I'm very familiar with the New York Economic Development Center. Such great work that is done there. And actually we've had a couple of representatives from the New York EDC at my conferences over the years. Great.

So, yeah, so some bet you we know a couple people in common, so I'm Probably. Excited to talk to you. But before we get into all of that, I would love to learn about you, Lindsay. So what sort of took you down this path and on this journey of helping New York's businesses?

Well, it sort of goes back to just being a product of growing up in a city. I grew up in Washington DC in the eighties and nineties, and I lived on one side of town and I went to a prep school on the other side of town. And you know, it was funny, there was this municipal bus that I could take home from school and it went basically on two avenues through the city and probably every single economic quintile while it did it. And so it was really fascinating just to see that change and that was sort of my everyday life, like the constant switching. And I was always really attuned to what does it mean to live in a neighborhood that feels like a good neighborhood versus a neighborhood that is, you know, feels good, but just looks and feels very different, didn't have services, didn't have things, didn't have as many parks and things like that.

And so I was very focused on what does it mean to impact communities? And that's how I ended up trying to pivot my career over time towards the work I ended up doing with the city of New York. But I came to realize partway through that I was very curious how businesses played a role in that. And so I wanted to effectuate that impact by working with and supporting businesses. I thought initially it would be about the real estate where the businesses live, and I realized, you know, part of the reason I went to grad school was to say I want to learn more about the businesses inside of the box and not just the box.

And that's indicative of the approach I take to the Navy Yard. We manage property, but the magic of the yard is what all the businesses that are here really do.

Yeah. So a little bit about your background because it is super interesting. So you have interesting experience

I've been all over, with I feel like.

Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that.

So the short version, so I grew up in DC, was fortunate enough to go to Harvard for undergrad, studied economics, again, was laser focused on get a job in the business world. And you know, I went to different interview sessions and info sessions for management consulting and investment banking because I was quick enough they came to campus and I went to so many of the consulting sessions and I was like, I don't understand what you're saying about what you do. But I was like, but I know math and I know science and I know spreadsheets, so I will go the banking route. And I liked that as a frame of reference and I spent three years at Goldman Sachs in investment banking, the first two of those years covering industrial businesses that make all sorts of different things, the widgets I studied in my economics classes, somebody that makes a screw that goes on a diesel engine for John Deere, all sorts of stuff like that.

And then I realized I could get to something that was closer to communities when I realized there was a real estate practice in the firm, and then eventually got myself to my second set of years there in the urban investment group, which was really about investing in either minority women owned businesses or in real estate that was in cities. And so that was where I ended up and I spent three years there, and ironically the managing director that I worked for there was Alicia Glenn, she eventually became deputy mayor for housing and economic development in New York. Wow. And so that was my entry point into the city, but in the inter reading time I had that epiphany of I want to study the businesses in the box, so I went to business school, I went to Yale because was A, was close to New York and I knew I wanted to come back to New York, and B, it was a place that had its history in nonprofit management, and so what that meant was the mix of people in the MBA program weren't just trying to go into banking or consulting, like I was deliberately leaving that world, and I wanted to be in a school community of people who wouldn't think I was crazy for wanting to get into, at that time, food.

Yeah. So I got into food businesses, I worked at FreshDirect for a couple years, and then I worked for a chia seed company for a couple years, and at that point I needed a break from the sort of startup food world, and that's when I reconnected with Alicia, and I had the opportunity to interview for a role in her team. That was September 2015, so I've been somewhere in the Citi family doing economic development for ten and a half years now.

Wow, congratulations. Thank you so much for going over that because I think it's so important for people to just sort of hear the the journey because, you know, it's like when we look back, it's, you know, it it looks divine and planned out. And we know that it's really not. It's, you know, you do make your own luck, you put yourself in places, you open your mouth and, you know, do great work. All of that is incredibly important.

But you know, sometimes you just happen across the the person that's gonna lead you to what's next so that that there's a little bit of magic in it and sometimes it works and sometimes it it doesn't. And I wanna be very transparent about that because whether we have great backgrounds or not, sometimes it's just the luck of the draw. And I feel so happy that you were able to align with somebody that then, you know, is doing the work that you really wanna do and that you were able to sort of jump over and do that.

Yeah. She's been a great mentor to me over the years, still is to this day, and another deputy mayor that I worked with but not for after Alicia left City Hall, Phil Thompson, who was a professor from MIT, who's really sort of studied ways to mold the economy to work for historically disadvantaged groups. And so I really, you know, I still talk to both of them, you know, several times a year and sort of draw inspiration from, you know, they come from two different schools of thought. Alicia was always a housing person, came from tenants rights, and Phil is an academic studying economic democracy, but the shared goal of how do we make this system that's largely capitalist work for people who don't always have access to the tools you need to be successful in that system.

Yeah, it's a big challenge.

Yeah. It's really big challenge and doing it for women owned businesses and for businesses owned by people of color, it's just harder. There's a lot of really great moments in it because you know, people from those backgrounds think about business opportunities differently, there's entire markets that people think of and solutions people think of because they come from a different background, And so it's great to be able to tap into and see that, but you have to nurture that in a different way.

Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about first the New York Economic Development Center and some of the work that's done there? And then, you know, of course, I wanna focus on the Brooklyn Navy Yard because that's where you're at right now. But just to give people, you know, anybody that's listening, I know we're all aspiring to a million dollars and beyond, but there's a lot of resources available for women owned businesses and businesses owned by people of color. So if you could talk a little bit about that, that would be amazing.

EDC is New York City's economic development agency. Most cities have them. They don't tend to have differing names, they almost always have economic development somewhere in the name, so they're easy to find, and they're typically a combination of real estate spaces that are usually affordable to small businesses, and also a set of programs that either help manage the real estate in support of particular businesses or, you know, run different incubators or connect to certain incentive programs or growth programs and you know, things we might always label small business support, but you don't really know what that means, but in practicality it's, you know, access to networks and capital and mentoring and detailed advisory services so that if you want to operate in XYZ sector but need technical support in doing that, you know, from someone who's built a business in that field or knows that supply chain or something else, it sort of connects you to those resources. And so EDC is just a really big organization that does all of that for the benefit of the whole of the city. And so it manages many millions of square feet of largely industrial properties similar to the Navy Yard, and it runs different programs in the innovation industry vertical that just help promote growth and growth with particular diversity in mind of new industries typically that will hopefully grow into being large employers in the city.

I love that. That's some and, you know, it's actually funny you mentioned Goldman Sachs earlier. I actually went through the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses program. Amazing. Yeah.

So it, you know, it very much has a similar goal in that it's to really help small businesses to grow and thrive so that they can become employers for, you know, the people in in all of these areas. And, you know, small business is is really the driver of the economy as much as the media focuses in on, you know, the the billion dollar unicorn companies and all the public companies. It's truly the small businesses that are, you know, the major employers. You know, I feel like we forget about that sometimes. And also small business is is super challenging and we, you know, we can use all of the resources that we can get.

So I I just, you know, love the work that's done there. So you transitioned over to Brooklyn Navy Yard when?

March 2022.

Okay. So you've been there. You've you've seen some things. Life has changed a a little bit. When did the Brooklyn Navy Yard and that area go from, you know, being a place where ships were, you know, built and and launched and, you know, a port into what it is today?

So really that started, I would say, the ingredients were put together in the early eighties when mayor Ed Koch created the development corporation of which I'm CEO that manages the Navy Yard on behalf of the city. But because the city was climbing out of a lot of fiscal difficulties, it wasn't able to invest in the infrastructure until the 90s, and so from 1966 when the Navy decommissioned the yard realistically until the late 1990s, everything just kind of sat here deteriorating. Were some businesses that were operating, but it was largely storage and warehousing because that was what worked in a place where you couldn't really attend to it in the way you might want. And so a bunch of the buildings deteriorated to the point where they were totally unoccupiable. And so a lot of the nineties and February and twenty tens were about investing some of that municipal funding into bringing those buildings back to life so you could rent the spaces to businesses who employ lots of people, and along the way BNY DC really focused its mission on how do I connect local residents in the immediate neighborhood in Brooklyn and New York City to those jobs as we refill those spaces they come online.

And do it in a way that is sort of mindful of the particular thing that we do here, is industrial and really manufacturing. Almost every business here makes something by and large, whether it's fashion and apparel companies, and that could be like high end fashion, or it could be like uniforms and everyday things, there's people here that are making food ingredients, there's people here that are making robotic arms and other people, there's a woman owned quantum networking company, which is amazing. There's pretty much anything you can think of that is in like a heavy metal production company is here. And then we still have a shipyard, right? That infrastructure that the Navy built is now a repair facility that's privately owned.

Amazing. And so all of that has sort of come together perspective, and we do direct training now for some of the jobs as they've changed. We started a technical high school that is your sort of modern iteration of vocational, but it's really set up to operate in a twenty first century environment of what that means. Yeah, my predecessor and some entrepreneur folks at the Department of Education said, We see the skills that are necessary to have a middle class job without going to college, and it is not what we do in our education system, but let's try to do a different version of it for modern times. And so we created that here, it's called the Brooklyn STEAM Center, it's an amazing institution, and there's now, it will be 600 young people that come here every day as juniors and seniors in high school and they spend half to more of their day here learning and getting certified in a particular pathway.

This is incredible. Yeah. But I wish that there was more media attention around that. It's really funny. I I actually teach entrepreneurship at two different places, NYU and also at Rice University in Houston in their online MBA program.

And one of the things that we do is we just sort of talk about how do you launch a business while reducing risk. And one of the topics that a group of students is working on is, you know, how do you as a parent who has child who is interested in technology, but you just see them sort of playing around. Right? And and you you want them to be able to use those skills in the future, but you don't know what to do and the school doesn't have the resources to support it, what do you do? What's what's the solution?

And so they're, you know, they're thinking about a solution. I should I should tell them, but I'll reserve it until they're they're done brainstorming. But, you know, this is this is a great idea because Yeah. Not everybody not everybody's path is college. And, you know, especially I mean, I I teach at two colleges, and and some of what the students tell me is that some of the courses that they're in, just, you know, they don't have a real world application.

It feels disconnected, it's not applied. And that's the thing with which we struggle and see here, which is the fundamental reason we created the STEAM Center, because the curriculum is informed by businesses that we've recruited and selected from within the yard and outside of the yard to create that pathway and give the roadmap to say these are the certifications the students need to have. These are the machines or software they need to be trained on. This is how that stuff is used in real life. So it's not just an academic approach to, oh, I need to know AutoCAD for design.

I need to know how to use a modern piece of equipment that mills and works with wood instead of doing it by hand. It's like you're going to make this. This is how you use this machine to do it. If you're gonna be in media, like the students are learning audio, they're learning how to create a podcast, how to shoot a commercial, all of these things, so it's applied. And I think that's the biggest insight we've seen as we've, you know, tried to build relationships with colleges to say these companies are high-tech, we need engineers, and even the engineers, which feels like a field that would be in demand, they don't have the applied skills to translate that once they get to a business.

And again, to your point of small business, if you go to GE or you go to Emerson, they're going to teach you all these things in a program, but if you're walking into a 50 person company, they can teach you but they don't have a ton of time to give you a long learning curve. And so it is important to invest in that application process of the learning. And that's what the STEAM Center does, and that's why all the students there, they're able to persist better in college, most of them go to college, because they know why they're there and they know how to connect it to real life. And so one of the things that we're doing in addition to expanding what the STEAM Center is doing and adapting new pathways for the future, we're trying to create and build a training center for adults that does the same thing.

Hey, everyone. So for years, I've been working with doctor Kent and sending people in my network his way. He does so much impact work. What do I mean by that? Well, he helps people create books and podcasts and things like that.

He even helps with this podcast behind the scenes. Doctor Kent is my thought partner. Anyone listening knows that we all need to do what we can to get our thoughts, opinions, and voices out into the world and how important it is for women to invest in other women and for women to hire other women. I am all about that, and you all know that. But in this case, I think doctor Kent is an exception.

He's doing something really different via this new program that he's launched called the Genius Discovery Program. So he wants to work with people like me and like you who are impact driven. Doctor Kent has an intensive program that goes for a month. He also has a three month program where he figures out where you're headed with your brand, your business, your speaking, and your signature story as a thought leader. I've known Doctor.

Kent for a long time. So believe me when I say that he has a ton of experience working with people that are looking to make an impact but might not know exactly how to approach them. So if you're interested in talking to him, you can go directly to talk to Kent dot com, or you can send me a DM on Instagram at She Leads Media, or just shoot me an email over at hello@SheLeadsMedia.com. I was, like, holding my tongue because I was about to say, you need to create this for older people too, because way that we were trained and what we learned and how to work for people is it's irrelevant and we need to be reskilled, you know? So many, there's so many capable people, everybody's living longer, we're all healthy and we might not wanna do what we went to college for anymore.

Yeah. There's oftentimes not a pathway forward.

No, there's not. There are people that maybe are sunsetting rightfully so in their current career, but still have a lot of value to add. We don't have a lot of ways to put people to use that allows them to still add value without having to be the person who's on the grind, you know, fifty, sixty hours a week, because it's important for them to step back and make room for other people to move up in the world. And there's a lot that people who've had a long career can teach young people. They may be digitally native and technically native, but if you the thing we've learned in our work is if you don't know the old school way of doing things when the internet is down or the power is out or you get to a particularly complex project, if you don't know the traditional way of doing it, the analog or the manual way, your brain isn't trained to help you troubleshoot for how to deal with those scenarios.

And so you need both sets of learning to really be effective. And this is where technology can be a really great tool. Like people talk about AI as an assistive device for someone who has had a lot of training, knows judgment, know how things work in different contexts, you know how to use AI to harness your inner skill set and save time on things that maybe are not the best use of your brain power. But if you're a young person who's using it to learn for the first time, that's I think when it's really dangerous and does a disservice because you're no longer teaching someone how to think. We're teaching them someone how to interact with a machine, and those are different things.

Yeah. Wow. I love this conversation so much. It's so true. There is so much value in, like, the analog world and the way that we sort of assess what's going on and we can sort of look at something and in our minds go through, did you try this?

Did you try that? Did you try this? Did you try the other thing is and I even see it in my own kids. I am like, do this, look for that, do and they don't think about that at all. They're like, how did you know that when you know nothing about what it is that I'm talking about?

And I'm like, I don't know. It's just the the way that we were taught to think. And I don't think it's irrelevant. I think like you said, it's incredibly valuable. But those and the the two things together, you know ...

The the sum is greater than the the parts themselves.

So Correct.

Yeah. So can you talk about you mentioned all the different types of businesses that are at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and then this this high school and the other upskilling for adults. What other type of, you know, resources are available for people? And and I wanna also ask, you know, is it just for people who live in Brooklyn? Could somebody who is in Westchester or Long Island or Queens, you know, take advantage of the programs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard?

So there's two different tracks, would say. So as a person who is seeking to work in any of these businesses and fields, that's open to everyone. Our services that work for businesses are focused on people who are a part of the art community in some way. Most of the time it is businesses who have some kind of residency here or affiliation with some of the incubators or they've gotten to know us because they're a local business that has been a part of our holiday market, as an example. And so we do tend to keep a pretty tight geographic ring for that because it's really about building a community and an ecosystem.

Part of the magic of the Navy Yard is that it is a captive community and a lot of the businesses collaborate with each other. A lot of our business development team's work is, you know, not just offering programming that helps businesses dive into supply chain issues or figure out the next version of marketing challenge, but also getting them together within their different industry groups to say, you all might be facing the same challenges, why don't you connect and talk? Or, you know, if you're in a creative or design business, you have a particular set of skills that may be useful to someone who is a fabricator who needs to do something but they're used to working with metal and they don't think about visual design aesthetics. And so we try to bring people together in all those different ways as well.

And how how do you bring people together? Do you put on events? Like what what are some of the ways? And the reason that I'm asking this is as you're talking, I'm thinking to myself, it seems to me that the Brooklyn Navy Yard really is getting it right. And are other economic development centers and different cities and things like that, are they following your lead?

So I'll take that in two parts. So yes, we do do events. We do events that bring people to the yard just to expose them to the yard, and we do employer showcases, industry panels, just to help introduce what the businesses are to each other and to the public sometimes, so that people have a sense of what goes on here, because it's a closed campus. Yeah. It's still an industrial park.

It's behind a wall. Know, the Navy built most of the wall and we've spent time literally taking down the bricks physically and metaphorically. But at the end of the day, it's an industrial park and people are moving things around and doing stuff all the time. It's like a truck derby in here. And so you don't exactly stroll through the Navy Yard.

So what we do is we create engagement opportunities for a variety of different people throughout the year. So we participate in the NYC Design Festival, we participate in something called Open House New York or Open New York, and then we have our Holiday Market. So there's three major points where anyone can come to the Navy Yard and see what is going on at any of the different businesses. In addition to the, you know, the sort of events we do throughout the year that are smaller, maybe focused on, let's talk about robotics, and who's doing robotics and what does it mean to do robotics in New York, or let's talk about, you know, is happening in sort of renewable energy, or, you know, an event we did a couple years ago during Climate Week, it's like, what does it mean to be working in sustainability as a person of color? And so we curate these different events throughout the year that are smaller and more intimate, and then we also do outreach to schools so that if you are a young person, yet in high school, not thinking about the STEAM center or anything like that, you're just a middle schooler and you're just like, what is business?

What is industry? They come, they get a tour, they get the history, but they get to see some of the things that get made. So cool. And gives them an exposure point early on to help them, to help sort of seed hopefully get those wheels turning for later.

Yeah. I love that so much because you can't be what you can't see to quote that phrase, right? And if your parents are struggling to just sort of make ends meet, you often don't you can't paint a bigger picture for yourself, a greater vision. And so being able to bring students in through school on field trips and expose them to, you know, what opportunities there are in the world even if they don't even understand it. Just, you know, I went to this really cool place that's doing incredible things with robots, you know, and I wanna do that one day.

That is I I mean, it just it almost makes me wanna cry because that's what this this country and and this world needs to be doing more and more instead of trying to keep people in the places that that the people that are currently in power want them to remain. So, you know, we we need to just be doing more and more of this work. And I I mean, I hope that people that are listening into this podcast, it's it's not like, you know, there's a million listeners here or anything like that. But I do hope that everybody does their part to show everybody that there's that there's more, that you don't have to remain where you are, and that there are lots and lots of opportunities and resources out there to to go and grow beyond, you know, where you are. So I I love what you're doing.

And and I guess the just the second part of the question to go back to that, are other economic development centers or even, you know, areas where their incubator programs and things like that, are they following your lead? Because it does seem like you're doing some really great stuff.

We do get a lot of visitors from other cities and countries. Yeah. You know, people looking you know, I think it initially comes from a place of we have this space, this area that was a former federal something, you know, when you have, you know, sort of big massive real estate that used to have one life and now people are looking to reimagine it and start fresh, We get a lot of people looking to do that, you know, whether it was, you know, folks we spoke to in Berlin a couple months ago who are redeveloping the former airport. You know, I had a really fascinating meeting with some folks from one of the cities in Ukraine that's 150 kilometers away from the conflict front lines who have this old former industrial site and they've been investing in all this infrastructure and they're like, when we get to the point where this conflict is over and we want to rebuild, how do we do that? How do we attract businesses to what we have?

And what does that look like? And so we get questions like that from all manner of cities and we share a lot about the model because there's a lot of uniqueness to it. It does really help to have the government support. We sustain our operating funds with the rent that the tenants pay us, but all of the huge sums of money that go to bring back to life a 100 year old building that like no longer has a roof. You can't do that with the private market, particularly when you're trying to support small businesses in new industries.

Like you're not going to produce a rent model that allows you to save extra money be able to do massive renovations. It just doesn't pencil that way. It's mission driven work. And so we do spend a lot of time in community with some other, you know, peer groups and people are trying to do their own version of it. And for certain cities it it goes a different way.

You know, other folks have turned older assets into industrial parks. You know, if the industrial park or sorry to an office park instead of industrial, some folks have taken an old industrial park and they've been able to clean it up environmentally and turn it into housing. And so you just have to be creative about, you know, what your options are. And I think doing work that creates space for businesses is really important. And there's a lot of people out there really focused on doing it and we do share best practices in terms of the toolkit and it's great to be a part of that.

I think there's a lot of us that are starting to think about what is the evolution of our toolkit, because we need more than affordable space. And so what does it look like for us to do that?

Yeah. Gosh. I I love this. And I was going to ask about that next sort of what is next for Brooklyn Navy Yard because like you said, I mean, in investment and, you know, money and cap you know, resources, capital, it's it's necessary. And and it's the, you know, it's the it's the blood life for small businesses.

We can't grow without it, and yet it's sort of the most difficult thing to secure.

So there's a couple different things that we do within our portfolio. One is being deliberate about how we manage and set aside certain spaces. So one of the things we've always done is try to keep a set of our spaces that are small enough for someone in a small business environment to come lease where they can have their own dedicated space to run their business. You know, you graduate out of an incubator or you've been able to do it in your house or some other kind of shared or private space, but you need to expand because you've got a big customer for the first time. You need a space that can do that, but you don't want to bite off more than you can chew.

So we're always investing in the real estate to make sure we have thousand square foot spaces, 1,500 square foot spaces that are suitable for that. And we often make those available you know, in a state where they're really kind of plug and play, people don't have to do too much of their own work and they're uniquely affordable, particularly for women and minority owned businesses. And then the other things that we do are, as we think about the future, is not just have more space in general, because we have all these businesses here, they eventually grow, have more people. We don't want them to feel like they have to move to Pennsylvania or move to Upstate New York. Some people get so big that they need acres and acres of factory floor space.

It's hard to do that in Brooklyn for a lot of reasons. But you can get to a decent size within the Navy Yard. The whole concept of the campus is to be able to go from an idea on a napkin to real scale production here, so a lot of what we're doing now is planning for and identifying space across the campus where we could create new purpose built industrials, so not just the stuff the Navy left us, but new things that are modern and really suit the technical manufacturing of the future so that we can make space for businesses doing things at scale because that's our most in demand space and we don't have a lot of it. So we're planning new buildings, which, you know, sort of sounds crazy, but domestic manufacturing is hard, but it has a purpose. So that's one element on the space side.

And then on the programming side, we're doing a lot of things to be mindful of what does the future for these businesses look like. So I talked about how we're evolving workforce, we've got the STEAM Center, we've got the adult, reskilling center, and on the business side, you know, we do all this work to keep an eye on what are these new industries that are likely to be growing in New York and are able to be viable here economically. You know, that's why we do things on robotics, and we're also doing things in parallel that says, okay, what does it mean to be a woman in manufacturing? Let's have a conference on that and partner with some people to focus specifically on that. What does it mean to be a BIPOC owned business in these particular spaces?

And so we've really amped up the amount of programming we do in that regard. And that's both for high-tech new industry and also for industry where entrepreneurship naturally occurs. And that tends to be food and beverage, fashion, things of that nature. And so one of the things we also did was we said, let's create a little bit of an accelerator program that's like a deep hands on experience for, you know, small companies in this group that want access to new tools, exposure to new technologies that help them get to that next level. And so that's how we came up with the program we launched last year called the Micro Business Accelerator Program.

Gosh. Lindsey, when do you sleep?

Not very much because I also have two young children. You know, sometimes I steal a power nap while I'm trying to, you know, play dead to get one of them to fall asleep.

My god. That's hysterical. I used to do that.

It's like we're all sitting there just lying in the dark like, okay, it's 08:15. Let's get to it. Come on.

I got things to do.

I got things to do.

You I I absolutely am so inspired by everything that you're talking about. I'm I'm just like, what else? What else? What else? I I'm also my wheels are turning.

I, you know, I teach this entrepreneurship class at NYU. They're in the the Tisch Center for Hospitality. So a lot of them are in, like, real estate finance. And we also do have people from the public arts administration program.

Great.

Yeah. So I am going to ask you if I could do a field trip to the Brooklyn Navy.

Bring them over.

Okay. That is so exciting. They're gonna be so happy. I have two groups of students, undergrads and grads. Great.

Yeah. We're gonna we'll come over. We'll we'll definitely coordinate. I I feel like there's so much more to talk about. I would love to have you back on again and maybe even talk about and feature some of the businesses, especially the women owned ones for for this podcast.

I definitely offer up my platform as visibility tool for some of those women owned businesses because, you know, we have to do it all together. So I I just wanna thank you so much for your time today, for sharing everything about your your background and all the amazing work that you're doing, and I just appreciate what you're doing so much.

Well, you. It's nice to be able to talk about it in that whole holistic set of things. We do do a lot here. We joke that we're sort of five nonprofits in one, and so sometimes when I'm engaging with people, I don't get to touch on everything and there's a lot here, but it's really important. And I think the benefit of the fact that we focus on people who are making things in the small business space means I can go a little bit deeper, I can, you know, scratch that itch of the part of me that wanted to be an engineer but was scared away by electrical engineering, which was totally done on purpose by the way, they totally want to scare girls away from engineering, But I get to be back among this great campus and great people and meet business owners and entrepreneurs who push through and are still doing their thing.

So I'd love to come back and talk and bring some of those women with me.

Amazing. Well, Lindsey, thank you so much. How can people get in touch with you, connect with you, and just learn more about Brooklyn Navy Yard?

Yeah. So we do have always growing Instagram feed, that's where we tend to feature more of the, we showcase some of the businesses and some of the things we do that face the public, I think that's tknavyard is our Instagram handle, but if you go to brooklynnavyard.org, that's our website, and you'll be able to find us on all the different socials there. LinkedIn, Instagram is pretty active on both.

Amazing, and people can find you on LinkedIn too if they want to talk to.

Yes they can, and I often post about some of the things we do at the yard and try to give people a little bit more of a preview to some of the sausage making, as we say.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And, we know how cold it is in here in New York, I think it's only gonna get colder. So stay warm, and thank you so much for spending your time with me here today.

It was a real pleasure to chat with you, Adrienne, and, thanks so much. Looking forward to connecting again.

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