Elliot Washor's TGIF 06.15.2026

Are You With Me Now? A.J. Ryder

I know this TGIF is late, but I've been waiting 53 years for the Knicks to win a championship so my timing is not so bad.

In 1973, I was 22 years old, but my Knicks obsession started long before that. All of that is to say that this week I found myself in Edison, New Jersey—the hometown of Karl-Anthony Towns (KAT). So when a group from BPL, including Mychal, Charlie, Anthonette, Andrew, Brian, and Thalia, met at the Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters (EASRCC) Training Center in Edison for a kickoff meeting with teams from EASRCC and the Contractors and Carpenters Trust (CCT), I was admittedly a bit distracted. We were there to launch our new work helping young people enter apprenticeships in the skilled trades via the Skilled Trades Apprenticeship Readiness Training (START) Centers Initiative, but as you can see, I was connecting just about everything to the upcoming Knicks games including where KAT came from.

That said, our time together was genuinely exciting. Depending on where you entered the BPL timeline, work involving partnerships like this have been a long time coming.

Here's our joint press release with EASRCC on the START Centers initiative.

Getting STARTED

Over the course of two days, everyone assembled got acquainted, built relationships, and set a course for the work ahead. Over the next year—and then over the following three years—we will establish three additional START Centers across New Jersey to the ones starting this year in Camden and Essex Counties. With hard work and a little luck, we can help change the ways young people follow their interests into meaningful work in the skilled trades and beyond at scale.

Although BPL has been doing versions of this work for decades, it is also true that we have not yet fundamentally changed how young people enter the skilled trades workforce. For me, it has always been obvious that we could never do this work alone. We needed the commitment of technical trainers like our union partnership, industry leaders, communities, and schools willing to think differently.

Were we ready? Are you kiddin’?

With B-Unbound, Harbor Freight Fellows, 311, and the IBPLC, we have many of the pieces in place. This is our opportunity to bring them together.

Of course, many questions remain.

Lots of people talk about the skilled trades, but does our society still have the patience for apprenticeships that value quality over efficiency and mastery over speed? How will this work change people, communities, and industries? What will be gained, and what might be lost along the way?

What we do know is that more and more young people find themselves in work that feels meaningless to them and disconnected from the needs of society. That emptiness is real. This initiative is an opportunity to reconnect work with purpose—to help young people develop skills that matter and contribute to something larger than themselves.

Meaningful work should not be viewed as an interruption to life. It should be part of life itself.

Don't get me wrong. I have no illusions that the skilled trades will somehow eclipse the current fascination with AI. If anything, the two sit in tension with one another.

When you place the skilled trades and AI side by side, you uncover a series of contradictions.

One question stands out:

What level of patience will school and industries have for developing tradespeople who possess genuine understanding of their craft?

We are at a crossroads

Many crafts and trades are struggling because fewer young people are signing up for the long apprenticeship journey—the path that requires time, focus, and discipline to develop from apprentice to journeyperson and, eventually, to master craftsperson.

AI often represents the opposite impulse. It promises speed, efficiency, and shortcuts. Apprenticeship asks something different. It asks people to embrace the slow process of becoming good at something—to find satisfaction not only in the result, but in the years, it takes to get there. Like the Knicks championship, it takes heart and heart is something that can’t be measured.

The real reward has never simply been mastery. Mastery with meaning and mattering is quite different.

The reward is becoming a kind of person capable of mastering something good for you personally and for your community.

Combination of the Two – Janis Joplin

Right now, the skilled trades—and civics—are hot topics in education. Everyone seems to be jumping on these as well as the AI bandwagon. That's often what happens in our world.

So here's a question:

Can we combine the skilled trades and civics?

In recent years, not many people have seriously explored that possibility, To me the connection is obvious. Tradespeople don't just build and repair things—they help communities function and participate in civic life.

Many skilled trades workers construct and maintain the systems that make civic life possible:

• Electricians wire schools, libraries, and government buildings.

• Plumbers maintain public water systems.

• Carpenters and laborers build community centers, parks, and affordable housing.

• Heavy equipment operators help build roads, bridges, and transit systems.

These are tangible examples of how deeply the skilled trades are connected to civic life. My hope is that we illuminate and combine the trades and civic life.

This coming week, Charlie and I will be traveling to meet students entering this new work. Personally, if I don't feel something, I don't fully understand it. So next week I'm on the journey with them.

As well and enjoy the NYC festivities.