Launch of Green-Collar Jobs Campaign
Posted by Kath Delaney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer on October 20, 2007
I feel like a kid in a candy store because I have been in Washington, D.C., all week attending briefings on domestic and foreign policy issues. Listening and learning about new policy initiatives is one of my favorite ways to spend the day.
So when I read Thomas Friedman’s article a few days ago about the work of Van Jones (pictured at left) and the Ella Baker Center on the new national project they are launching—the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign: Green For All—I got really excited. I live near Oakland, home of the Ella Baker Center, and have been hearing about the project. However this week while I happened to be in D.C., the project and the concept of greening the workforce began to take hold on the national level.
Green For All’s goal is to secure $1 billion in funding for green-collar job training in order to lift 250,000 people out of poverty across the country. It works in three main fronts:
- National Advocacy in the federal government and the private sector to ensure that the United States has an abundant supply of well-trained “green-collar” workers and entrepreneurs, focusing on those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
- Technical Assistance in “green-collar” job training and to align business, labor unions, community organizations and educational institutions.
- Public Education to impact news coverage, produce videos,
host convenings, create advocacy toolkits, employ new media and anchor
a Web 2.0 strategy for shaping debate, organizing discussion and
sharing best practices.
In a speech Senator Clinton gave in Oakland a few weeks ago, in front of 14,000 people, she introduced Van’s concept of green-collar jobs to the crowd to roars of excitement. To have Van Jones’s visionary leadership shape the Democratic front-runner’s message on the environment and job creation gives me hope. Another statistic I heard this week is that Oakland, California, has a high school drop-out rate at 47%. Like all those that heard this shocking number, I realized that Van was really up to something significant. If you create green jobs in communities across California and eventually the nation that support sustainability and job creation in vulnerable communities, then we can begin to radically shift the tide of the detrimental policies.
Learn more about Green-Collar jobs and Van Jones’s work at the Ella Baker Center.
