If you’ve been in a cave for the last few years and haven’t checked out the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights yet, it’s time to get with the picture. They’re leading the charge for a Green Jobs Corps and working to “ensure that this green economy is strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” They’re also one of Step It Up’s new friends and allies. This November 3rd, along with thousands of students at Power Shift 2007, hundreds of communities across the country will join the Ella Baker Center in taking up the call of “Green Jobs Now!” Here’s a post from Jacob Russ who works at the Ella Baker Center that went up on the Step It Up site today:
Under low white clouds and an uncharacteristically blue Bay Area sky, a team of local twenty-somethings stood on a roof, raising solar panels. A Raiders sticker on one hardhat and flopping dreadlocks under another gave clues that this group was not a typical construction team. The youth who connected these clean energy panels were benefiting from the green economy — benefits usually reserved for those putting sacks stuffed with fair trade coffee and organic soymilk into the trunks of their Priuses.
These builders got their know-how from a job training program they completed this summer, the joint effort of a local solar company and a local job development organization. Did you see that “Green Jobs Now” pillar of the 1 Sky campaign and the Energy Action Coalition? This program brings green-collar jobs to life.
Folks whose employment searches face the stiffest systemic difficulties, like low-income youth and the formerly incarcerated, are eligible for the program. Participants learn job skills – everything from traditional construction to interviewing, as well as skills applied to new trades in the emerging green economy: installing solar panels, maintaining wind turbines, growing agriculture organically, and more. An important final step connects local green employers to program graduates through a job fair, lining up real jobs for participants!
A Green Jobs program in Richmond, CA takes the “green pathways out of poverty” concept a step further, identifying low-income homeowners whose homes are used as training sites. A special city loan lets the homeowner borrow money for the solar panels, and doesn’t require full repayment until the house is sold. In the meantime, homeowners who may have never had the chance to invest in solar power get to enjoy watching their electric meters run backwards. How sweet an incentive to choose clean energy!
This November 3rd, whether you’re going to Power Shift or organizing a local Step It Up rally, let’s put Green Jobs Now in the center of the agenda.
