Green For All

On a sunny November afternoon, Van Jones strides into a vegetable patch on West Oakland’s 55th Street. A patch of green in an urban sea, the garden is run by the People’s Grocery, a non-profit funded by Jones’ outfit, Green for All.

Well over six feet tall with a crisp goatee and scholarly looking glasses, Jones cuts a striking figure as he wanders around the garden in a black business suit and patent leather shoes. All around him volunteers with rolled-up sleeves dig weeds from the patches of kale, chard, crookneck squash and lettuce. He gathers the gardeners and poses a question.

“What if someone were a cynic, and they said, ‘Oh, this is cute, but what is actually the potential?’”

Vicki Ramos, a People’s Grocery field organizer, speaks up. She says the folks who live on or near 55th Street in working-class West Oakland don’t have access to any healthy food. There’s not one grocery store from Rte. 580 all the way to the depressed region of West Oakland known as The Bottoms — a neighborhood that is home to about 40,000 people. But there are at least 40 to 50 liquor stores in that space, and 65 percent of the population there is eligible for food stamps. The kids eat fast-food burgers and processed foods that come in foil bags from corner liquor stores. Or they eat nothing at all.

Programs like the People’s Grocery, with the help of Van Jones and his Green for All initiative, intend to change all that.

As of now, only five to ten percent of the people who eat food produced in this small green patch participate in its production. The same is true of two other urban gardens in the neighborhood. Once Green for All’s program expands this spring, it will provide funding to allow the People’s Grocery to serve about 30 percent of local families.

Likewise, environmental job-training programs across the country will get a boost from federal money and Green for All’s resources to help low-income people rise into the middle class. And it will all be from the ground up.

“There’s a convergence,” Jones says after thanking the volunteers. “You have people trying to solve actual, practical problems, like how to get a healthy dinner, and they do it with incredible tenacity and innovation. Over the bridge in Marin County, moral outrage leads them to do the same thing. If you put those two wires together, you get a spark that produces real change.”

Providing a spark is what Jones and Green for All are all about. The organization works with federal agencies to distribute $125 million to green jobs, such as the ones these gardeners are doing. It’s doing job-training programs for 35,000 people. It’s working to amass $25 million yearly to create green “pathways out of poverty” for former prisoners. It’s trying to educate the uneducated. It also challenges people to rethink the green movement as something universally beneficial, rather than something “worth trying if you have the resources.”

And they’re not alone.

Similar work is being done 3,000 miles away in New York. There, Majora Carter, Green for All’s co-founder, has gained media momentum for her Sustainable South Bronx organization. Stories in Time and The New York Times, TV appearances, big-ticket speaking engagements and a laundry list of awards have made the careers of Jones and Carter into long advertisements for urban environmentalism. But are the efforts of their organizations viable, long-term? Is their mission realistic? Are citizens ready to believe the environmental movement can provide work for the jobless, boost a sagging economy and bring hope to those who need it?

Anthony “Van” Jones has no doubts. He grew up in rural West Tennessee and attended the University of Tennessee at Martin, the first university in the state to desegregate. After graduating in 1990, Jones gave up a promising journalism career to attend Yale Law School. And then, rather than embarking on a profitable career with a big firm, he moved to Oakland. There, he initiated a program called Bay Area Police Watch in response to accounts of widespread police brutality. What started solely as a citizens’ watchdog group became the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996, with programs like Books not Bars and Silence the Violence geared toward at fighting the construction of Bay Area jails and keeping high-risk youth out of the penal system.

The shift in focus from jails to environmental justice didn’t come until a few years ago. “Van always says he felt like he was living on the Amistad, that we had to overcome racial disparities,” says Alli Chagi-Starr, a long-time Ella Baker staffer who has known Jones for over a decade. “But then he looked over the side of the boat and saw the Titanic — climate change. The story has to change if you realize the earth is in trouble.”

In late 2006, the Ella Baker Center began lobbying Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and the city council for money to establish an Oakland Green Jobs Corps. The goal was — as Jones tends to repeat like a personal mantra — “to connect the people who most need jobs with the jobs that most need to be done.” In the summer of 2007, City Council voted unanimously to invest $250,000 toward training programs for “green collar jobs,” a term coined by Jones, intended to evoke the low-income jobs held by blue collar industrial workers of previous generations.

That quarter of a million came to Oakland’s city council as part of a legal settlement against California Utilities after the energy crisis of 2001. The money, which will be administered by the Ella Baker Center over the next nine months, “sets up the possibility to create a green jobs model [to] create green pathways out of poverty,” says Ian Kim, director of the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, using another of Jones’s mantras. “The place where the government really needs to play a role is in workforce development, job training, education and social services,” says Kim. “We need to take government money and invest that into opportunities with people, because what we’ve seen in the last 40 years is dis-investment in low income communities, communities that are hit the hardest.”

Kim says training low-income people for green jobs will not be cheap, but it will cost far more to incarcerate them if they commit a crime out of economic desperation. He calculates it would cost about $20,000 per year, per worker, to run a pilot program for new workers in Oakland, but he believes the city’s initial investment in Green Jobs Corps will lead to matching investments from private donors and government agencies. “There is potentially decades of work for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs in retrofitting our built environment,” he says. “And if we are going to save ourselves from climate crisis, we have to treat this as an emergency.”

Politics Green for All spun off of the Green Jobs Corps, and, in its short lifespan, has begun to tackle not just works projects but also legislative issues. In the process of securing funds for the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, the Ella Baker Center attracted attention from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Jones crossed the Bay Bridge last summer to the congresswoman’s San Francisco office. Together, they composed the Clean Jobs Bill of 2007. This later became the Green Jobs Act, which merged into title I of the Energy Bill that passed the House of Representatives on August 4, 2007.

That bill, which was re-dubbed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, was signed into law by President Bush on Dec. 19. It allocates $125 million per year for green jobs training programs, and about 20 percent of that goes directly to “green pathways out of poverty.” The remainder goes toward re-training union workers and market research. It is this money — the $25 million set aside for training people with little or no education or jail records — that Green for All is most concerned about. Especially since it was initially axed out of the Senate version of the bill, on orders from Senate republicans. Jones’ lobbying team fought, ultimately successfully, to get the money back into the bill.

If we rebuilt Europe after a war, surely we can rebuild this country!” — Majora Carter Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx

Green for All is still in its gestation period. But many industry experts see serious potential in models like it. “The market opportunity is immense,” says energy consultant Peter Fusaro of Global Change Associates, for green building and retrofitting the millions of structures in American cities. “There are only 6,000 green buildings in New York right now, and 900,000 more that could be retro-fitted.”

These days, Jones’ job as director of the Ella Baker Center has effectively become a full-time PR tour. In one marathon day he holds a staff meeting, visits the People’s Grocery, gives an inspirational talk to a young black men’s group that has bussed itself in from Chicago, speaks at a community rally at a church near Oakland’s Lake Merritt and then hops on the BART train across the Bay to receive an award from the Full Circle Fund, taking the mic right after Al Gore in front of an audience of black-tie San Francisco philanthropists, all the while trailed by his frazzled personal assistant. But before the back-to-back speeches begin, Jones drives to Richmond, a working- class East Bay city of about 100,000, mostly blacks and Hispanics. There, on the roof of a squat yellow house, about a dozen workers, trained by a program called Richmond Build, install solar panels. The panels will provide savings of about $2,000 per year for Annie Shumake, the elderly woman who owns the house and has lived there on a fixed income for 56 years.

As the workers finish wiring, Jones and the crowd of builders and electricians gather around the electric meter to watch it slow to a stop, then start turning backwards as the silicon panels start adding kilowatts to the local grid. “What a blessing!” Ms. Shumake keeps repeating, slapping her knees and rubbing
her hands together. “I can’t hardly explain, I’m so happy!” The panels, which cost about $15,000 and last about 30 years, were funded by a rebate from Pacific Gas & Electric and obtained by a non-profit group called Solar Richmond. According to Michele McGeoy, Solar Richmond’s director, the goal is to provide green jobs while reducing energy costs for low-income residents. They network with Richmond Build and a technology company called Grid Alternatives to ensure the panels are installed and working properly. By the end of this year, the group will have completed 150 installations, most of them done as part of a nine-week, hands-on training program for local tradespeople, many of whom have criminal records or a history of unemployment.

Martin Marino, a 33-year-old pipe fitter who helped install the panels through Richmond Build’s training program, says he plans to work as an electrician’s apprentice specializing in solar power when the training ends next week. He says he can make $19 to $20 an hour doing solar panel installations, which is a step down in pay from what he used to do as a pipe-fitter, but is important because “it’s helping the earth.”

“We don’t come to people saying, ‘You should care about the environment,’” says McGeoy. “They want to work, and the way at it is to show them, here’s a job, and the environmental piece fits into it.” Without a grant or subsidy for the initial purchase of the panels, none of this would be possible. Solar energy remains impractical for most low-income households, says Tim Sears, one of the directors of Grid Alternatives. The equipment and installation costs are prohibitive, and programs to fold the cost of going solar into property tax charges or savings-based “power purchasing agreements” are few and far between, mostly available in places like Berkeley, where incomes are higher and property values soar. “Without a program like ours, it doesn’t really make much sense,” says Sears.

A similar scene unfolds three thousand miles away, on the East Coast and on top of Majora Carter’s three-story, South Bronx rowhouse. Three men bundled in scarves and down jackets install a drainage system. Dwaine Lee, James Wells and Amilcar Laboy are “greenway stewards,” paid by Carter’s organization, Sustainable South Bronx, to “green up” the neighborhood. In this case, that means covering the roof in layers of soil, sand and gravel to create an filtration system that provides insulation and stormwater management.

Green roofs like this one counteract the “heat island” effect produced by most cities with conventional insulation and roofing systems. Projects like this one, which provide work for ex-cons and create practical solutions to urban problems, are part of Carter’s vision. She describes it as a sort of “Marshall Plan” that starts small and serves as a model for other cities. Her thin, neat braids are going slightly gray. She speaks with a commanding, brisk tone, smiles often, and looks you straight in the eyes almost unflinchingly. “The whole point is to show that what’s happening to the South Bronx is not specific to the South Bronx,” she says. “What we’ve done is to show that through green collar job training, specific advocacy and creative network-building, you can actually have an impact — both economically and environmentally, for anybody that’s watching or that wants to be a part of it.”

The three men who installed this $15,000 green roof have, among them, reformation stories any social worker would be proud to tell. None of them is college-educated; all of them are ghetto-hardened black men from low-income backgrounds, yet all three talk passionately about their jobs, environmental injustice and how important it is to fight for the planet. Today, they are making adjustments to the rooftop system, making sure the netting that holds the soil together is firmly in place, making sure the runoff is flowing down properly to irrigate a backyard garden and contemplating how to stop pigeons from eating plants.

“I don’t think most people would have an awareness [about what we’re doing],” says Wells. “But once you tell them, most people are receptive to what you’re saying about how we’re using trees and green roofs to manage stormwater, and how that’s going to improve our water quality.” Before Wells enrolled in Sustainable South Bronx’s nine-week program, he was earning minimum wage at two jobs in Manhattan and living with his parents. Not long ago, he was serving ten years for robbing bodegas and restaurants in the Bronx. Wells earned his GED behind bars, and heard about Majora Carter’s pro¬gram from his father. He and Laboy, who also did time in his 20s for armed robbery, took part in the training together. Now they both make $22,000 annually to install these green roofs, collect garbage and, their favorite, prune trees.

“I like the before and after of [the job],” says Wells. “You can see something that’s destroyed, then brought back to life.”

The offices of Sustain¬able South Bronx, filled with modern furniture and a veritable jungle of houseplants, overlook Lafayette Avenue in gritty Hunts Point. The street is infamous for the number of prostitutes that linger in front of its squalid apartment complexes, turning tricks in the overgrown vacant lots and shooting up behind trees. Here in New York City’s poorest congressional district, the only view to speak of is of the sewage plants and waste transfer stations that jut out along its triangular peninsula into the Harlem River and Long Island Sound.

All three Green Stewards agree that their boss, Majora Carter, has that unnamable quality that makes it impossible not to listen to what she says.
And what she’s saying, more often than not, is full of outrage and indignation from a lifetime spent in Hunts Point, watching a neighborhood already crippled by poverty get repeatedly short-changed by the city. “I was an expert on the community thing, and I realized that the environment was screwing up my community,” she says of her early years after college at Wesleyan University. She had moved back home to study writing at NYU and work as an arts activist in Hunts Point. Her current house is across the street from her childhood home on Menida Street, on a block of stand-alone Victorians that look more like old-town Philadelphia than New York City.

Some say the problem with new urban environmentalism is that it makes positive change sound like an inevitable economic truth. Hanging around Jones for a day, you’ll often hear him say the price of going green is irrelevant because the price of not doing so is much higher. But then, invariably, he leaves it at that, as though everyone else has reached the same conclusions as he has, and there’s just some minute change that needs to happen to kick this revolution into gear.

Carter does something similar when she talks about her “Marshall Plan” — “If we rebuilt Europe after a war, surely we can rebuild this country!” She takes her own agency out of the equation. It’s as if somewhere between grassrootsism and playing amateur economists, both of these leaders have forgotten how important it is to get the federal government and private investment dollars behind their plan, not just the charity ball debutantes sipping wine at the next Al Gore speech in San Francisco.

Trying to tackle the government’s attitude towards traditional, non-renewable utilities and laissez-faire attitude towards alternative energy might be a good place to start. Michael Kinsley, a cities expert with the Rocky Mountain Institute, says that utility policy is one of the biggest barriers in the way of moving forward with renewable energy policies. “There’s a bias in the system towards building big power plants,” he says.

Demand-side efficiency is much less expensive than providing supply-side energy, but it’s a messier process, he adds. “It’s cheaper for a utility to provide efficiency in how I heat my home or provide light to my home than it is to build and maintain a new power plant. That fact is the reason why there is such a huge opportunity here. But state law biases supply. Utilities are rewarded for supplying more electricity, not more efficient service.”

And with the money earmarked for Jones and Carter’s “green pathways out of poverty” job training programs currently in danger of being a one-time fix-all for the green collar future, it may take a new champion to jump-start the green collar jobs revolution. Can urban America afford to wait?

Back at the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Jones doesn’t think that we can.

“What’s more important, protecting a vulnerable planet or protecting vulnerable people?” he asks. “We say, you can’t protect a vulnerable planet without protecting vulnerable people, and vice versa. When [you] try to solve either problem, you find that there is one solution, and that solution is a green economy that’s robust enough to lift people out of poverty. The longer you look at this thing, the more convinced people become.”