Summer Fellowship: Connecting the (Green) Dots

Submitted by Richard Burden on August 6, 2008 - 11:27pm.

Every time I start talking about Green-Collar Jobs, it doesn’t take long before I start channeling Van Jones, one of the founders of the Ella Baker Center and now executive director of Green for All, the organization that does nationally what the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign does for California. Green-collar jobs is an attempt to view and treat the problems of poverty and the environmental crisis as deeply related issues. This might be a new paradigm for policy work, but it is ancient theology. Jeremiah links exile and environmental collapse as the consequences of idolatry and sin,[See, Northcott, Michael S. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2007)] as does Hosea (Hosea 4:1-3).

In short, Green-Collar Jobs says that to combat global climate change we need to completely retrofit our cities. First we need to make them energy efficient, then we need to hook them into renewable energy streams. That means a LOT of work that is impossible to outsource. It’s work that has to be done here, and now. What the Green-Collar Jobs campaign does is try to connect up all these jobs with the people who most need the work. Let’s take those folks who most need work and train them to do the work that most needs to be done. I can feel the channeling starting, maybe I should let Van do the “van-gelism” that he does so well. Here he is laying out a history of the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign at EBC, and connecting the dots between the environmental movement and the social/racial justice movements.

That was a couple of years ago. What I witnessed and worked on this summer were two projects that emerged out of this initial vision, one now up and running, and the other still in process but even so more successful than anyone predicted. First, I was at the Oakland City Council meeting this summer where the Public Works Committee gave authority to release $250,000 for the start of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps . This was an idea pushed by the Ella Baker Center and the Oakland Apollo Alliance among others. A year ago, the Oakland City Council approved a green-jobs pilot program that would actually build green pathways out of poverty. It took over a year for the selection of the various components of the program and for the money to be approved, but this year some 40 individuals will enter the first class of the Oakland Green-Jobs Corps. It was thrilling to see so much excitement around this and to see the broad coalition that EBC and her partners were able to put together to make this happen. If all goes well, the hope is that this will become a model that will not only help Oakland’s poor residents but can be replicated in other cities across the country.

The second project, and the one that took up the bulk of my summer was building up support for SB 1672, a Green-tech and career education bond that incoming Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg has authored. SB 1672 would create a $2.25 billion bond that would fund investment in training and education for green jobs. Again, this bill emerged out of the confluence of two previously unrelated political footballs. 1) In September of 2006, California Bill AB 32 (The Global Warming Solutions Act) was signed into law. In short, this law requires that the state of California reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels (roughly minus 25%) by 2020. How are we going to accomplish this? (Through Green-Jobs!). 2) Just recently the California Department of Education released new, accurate, and shocking figures for the dropout rate in the state. The state dropout average is 24%, but in certain areas this is much higher. Oakland, for instance, is 37%, and if you factor in race the picture is even bleaker: the African American rate is 41%, American Indian and Latina/o rates hover around 30%. Just a few days after Al Gore announced his “Ten Year” challenge to 100% renewable energy, Sen. Steinberg announced his own Ten Year challenge—cut the dropout rate in half. Sen. Steinberg, along with EBC and his coalition partners (which includes environmental, business, education, labor, community and civil rights organizations), view these challenges as meeting the same goal. As Steinberg put it,

We're entering a brave new phase of our economy, and the renewable energy revolution could be California's next Silicon Valley, if we play our cards right. We must feed that revolution with skilled workers, from linemen and plumbers to product marketers and engineers. An educated and nimble workforce will strengthen existing businesses and attract entrepreneurial energy to ignite our future prosperity. We won't get there by losing 140,000 kids a year.

In other words, the road to renewable energy AND better schools is paved with good, green jobs. And that’s good news, as far as I’m concerned. SB 1672 is up for a vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee this week.

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