Edutopia - April/May 2008 - (Page 44)

oVan Jones Blazing a green path out of poverty T he way you “create a green pathway out of poverty is,” Van Jones says, “you line up your green-job seekers with your green-job trainers with your green-job creators.” It is, Jones believes, not merely the key to a sustainable future but also the future, and a highly worthwhile one, for the many underprivileged young people entering the workforce without college degrees. The future is something Jones, a 1993 Yale Law School graduate, thinks about a lot. He’s also been doing something about it for much of his adult life. He’s the founding president of Green for All, an organization in Oakland, California, focused on building what he calls “a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” In 1996, Jones cofounded Oakland’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and for years he has been a key ﬁgure in battling social inequality and environmental destruction through an array of advocacy organizations. His work has been acknowledged with a Reebok International Human Rights Award, his selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellowship. “From the point of view of planetary survival, every job needs to be a green job,” Jones says. In the twenty-ﬁrst century, he adds, “there will be a need to focus much more on math and science and the need for technological innovation and invention. We’re focused on those young people who may not have college in their future. We want to make sure that we bring back vocational arts. We see a need for vocational skills training, a need for a well-paid green-collar workforce in the United States that can install solar panels, weatherize, retroﬁt buildings, do rainwater management, and construct buildings that are smarter with regard to energy and water. We think that the sooner those values get inculcated in young people, the better off we’ll be.” Not surprisingly, Jones’s views have been getting the recognition they deserve. In 2007, the Ella Baker Center and the Oakland Apollo Alliance proposed a youth-training program—the Green Jobs Corps—the City of Oakland adopted. But what role does public education play in Jones’s vision for green-collar jobs? “We’ve been using our school systems, all the way through college, to train people for the pollution-based jobs of the last century,” he explains. “There needs to be a sea change in our educational system to get people prepared for a world where, frankly, there’s going to be a lot more resource competition and resource scarcity, and we’re going to have to be much smarter and more conscious about how we produce and consume.” Jones sees a future in which high schools play a central role in getting students to consider green jobs as viable, rewarding career options in terms of both satisfaction and salary. Kids are leaving high school, Jones says, “sometimes prematurely without those vocational skills.” He wants to see schools make available what he calls “a menu of options of good, digniﬁed work.” Once you get Jones talking about this subject, which takes little coaxing, his passion kicks in. “If you look at these extreme weather events, at the coming water shortages, at the lack of investment in our infrastructure over the past thirty years, you see there’s going to be an enormous labor demand for skilled vocational work, and the people doing it are going to be the heroes who build, rebuild, retroﬁt, and reboot this country,” he says. “We should tell students this from the beginning: It’s a huge opportunity to make a good living, but also to make a big difference in your country.” “I’m a civil rights lawyer, I come out of that background, and Martin Luther King Jr. fought and died to racially integrate a pollution-based economy,” Jones continues. “I think we have a moral obligation in the new century to make sure that the new clean, green economy includes everybody from the beginning.” Jones cites three achievements in the Bay Area he’s especially proud of: the Oakland City Council’s unanimous approval of the Green Jobs Corps proposal, Green for All’s work with Solar Richmond doing direct vocational training and job placement with primarily low-income African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, and working with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “She believes in the vision,” Jones says of meeting with Pelosi. “She helped us get into Title X of an energy bill, a provision called the Green Jobs Act of 2007. President George W. Bush signed it into law in December.” The provision appropriates $125 million, Jones explains, “enough money to train about 30,000 people a year every year in the green trades, and 20 percent of those dollars are to be directed toward at-risk folks, people with barriers to employment.” Asked to sum up his vision for kids, education, and careers, Jones thinks for a moment, then displays his gift for explaining complexity in simple, concise language: “All across the country, you have all this work that needs to be done, and you have all these people who need work. Why don’t we connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to get done?” 44 EDUTOPIA APRIL/MAY 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Edutopia - April 2008

Edutopia - April 2008 Contents Up Front Feedback Dispatches Sage Advice Ask Ellen Head of the Class Cool Schools Design Reinventing the Big test The Daring Dozen Heart & Soul Pop Quiz: Jack Prelutsky

Edutopia - April 2008

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