Matt Cohen, president and CEO of the Long Island Association (LIA), said business communities are more resilient and stronger when they collaborate in the face of uncertainty at Blank Slate Media’s event for the Top Business Leaders of Nassau County.
As head of the region’s leading nonprofit business organization, Cohen said businesses are stepping up to adversity both at home and across the world.
“2021 was a tough year for our businesses, coming off 2020 which was even tougher,” Cohen said Thursday night. “We’ve had to overcome public health challenges, supply chain issues and inflation but what our business community proved was that it’s more resilient and stronger when we collaborate.”
As a keynote speaker for the event held at Crest Hollow Country Club in Woodbury, Cohen was joined by other speakers Kathleen Wisnewski of National Grid Long Island, John Flanagan of Northwell Health and John Buran of Flushing Bank. The event was hosted by Antoinette Biordi, a three-time Emmy award-winning anchor and reporter who has been with News12 Long Island since 2010.
Cohen also described the LIA’s 2022 policy priorities, which included helping small businesses, making Long Island more affordable, making business more inclusive and improving infrastructure, among other things.
“Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy,” Cohen said. “It’s about 90 percent of all businesses on Long Island and they went through hell and back again during the height of COVID-19.”
Flanagan, the senior vice president of government affairs at Northwell Health, spoke on the ingenuity and creativity needed, specifically by CEO Michael Dowling, to get New York’s largest private employer on the other side of the pandemic.
“From March to May in 2020, over 21,000 New Yorkers died from COVID-19, that tsunami hit New York more than anywhere else,” Flanagan said. “So with our employees we tested more, cared for more people. There wasn’t anything anyone could have done to prepare for what came.”
Flanagan said Dowling preached against hysteria in an op-ed he wrote for Newsday, saying that common sense, following science and protecting people were going to make the difference.
Pictures of Blank Slate Media’s Top Business Leaders of Nassau County can be found here.