Brooklyn's Progress
November 2001

CitiCorp donated $10,000 for training classes for apparel workers at the Brooklyn Mills Quick Sew Training Center. The Garment Industry Development Corporation (GIDC) will provide free vocational training programs for garment-industry workers at Brooklyn Mills and other businesses in the Sunset Park and neighboring Bay Ridge areas. The courses will help the workers obtain the skills that they need in order to retain and advance at jobs in the apparel industry. The courses will be conducted at the Brooklyn Mills Quick Sew Training Center on weekends, accommodate ten people at a time and be conducted in the first languages of the students, which for many in the area is Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and French. Each class will run for 15 weeks and cover basic sewing for recent immigrants with no past experience in the garment industry, specialty machine sewing class for the advanced worker, and sewing machine maintenance and repair. The Quick Sew Training Center at Brooklyn Mills is a 27,000-square-foot garment manufacturing incubator built by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce in 1999 on the waterfront in Sunset Park. The facility was built at the recommendation of Borough President Howard Golden who was providing funding for its construction. Brooklyn Mills offers affordable rents and business and technical support for small entrepreneurial firms whose growth is constrained by a business or production issue. The facility is run by the Brooklyn Alliance, the non-profit affiliate of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. To register for sewing classes, call Annie Liu at GIDC, (212) 366-6160.