Internship Description
Megan Daley ’20 interned at Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC), a nonprofit real estate developer and management company owned by the City of New York. BNYDC'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 the economic opportunity and resources of the Yard. Megan worked with the BNY business support services program and drove initiatives for the Yard’s COVID-19 relief program, including developing plans to help create additional revenue streams for tenants, providing COVID-specific resources for the Yard community, and raising funds on behalf of BNYDC to ensure long-term impact for the corporation and the community.
While at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation on the business support services team, my role was to provide services and programs to Yard tenants in an effort to support their growth and success. The economic shift due to the pandemic made this work even more important and rewarding than ever.
Many of our tenants had shifted their production to PPE items, so I worked to create additional revenue streams for them. I developed COVID gift boxes and helped develop an e-commerce site to sell these boxes. I also worked with our food and beverage tenants to host socially distanced outdoor events at the yard in order to bring in the surrounding community. Finally, it was my role to craft a plan for how the Yard would use a $50,000 grant to support small businesses who have pivoted their production. I built partnerships with small business education companies, worked on marketing material, and identified further revenue generating opportunities for our tenants to support them. This work closely aligns with Brooklyn Navy Yard’s long-term mission to create positive impact for its community and NYC more generally.
In order to ensure I was approaching projects correctly, I sent out surveys to our tenants and was able to use the skills I learned at Columbia Business School to best analyze and determine a plan of action based on the results. I also found myself having to negotiate agreements with small business education providers and my learnings from managerial negotiations came in handy during this process.
There are always competing priorities at any job, but especially at a nonprofit. It was important for me to stay focused on the projects that I felt were most important so they wouldn’t get deprioritized over something else.
My long-term goal is to be a landlord, so I learned the importance of giving back as a landlord by working for the Navy Yard. Your work is so much more rewarding when you know that you are making a positive impact on the tenants that you work with and the larger community. This is a lesson that I look forward to carrying with me throughout the rest of my career.