| On a dreary March morning, dozens of people crowded into the lobby of a former bank building in the Bronx now occupied by the Osborne Association, a nonprofit organization that helps people with criminal histories find jobs. They had come to watch Osborne launch a Green Career Center. The tablecloths were green. The goody bags were green. Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. took a three-foot pair of scissors to a green ribbon, but couldn’t cut it. Only after repeated chops and a few more sets of hands was he able to slice the symbolic band in two.
Since then, thirty-six people have graduated from the career center, which will train about 400 people with criminal records to work in a greener marketplace over the program’s eighteen months. The center is supported almost entirely by $2 million in federal stimulus funds through the Department of Justice, and it’s the latest addition to a borough-wide effort, led by nonprofits like Sustainable South Bronx and the borough president’s office, to green the local economy, much as President Obama has promised to do across the country.
The local economic development corporation’s environment and energy initiative has funded the installation of thirteen green roofs and provides business loans of up to $100,000 for energy efficiency measures. And a number of other local organizations have green job training programs as well. The Bronx is as good a place as any to start these projects. It’s one of the poorest counties in the nation, with an unemployment rate of nearly 14 percent. The borough disproportionately bears the environmental burden of supporting a city of 8 million people, with a high concentration of waste transfer stations, heavy industry, crisscrossing highways and the truck traffic that follows. ...
Standing with the borough president that day were a host of examples. There was a representative from a local union devoted to weatherization and the owner of a company that manufactures green cleaning supplies and a solar-powered trashcan with a built-in compactor. There was Omar Freilla, who runs an organization that helps start environmentally friendly, worker-owned businesses. Freilla started Green Worker Cooperatives seven years ago. Before that, he worked with Sustainable South Bronx, an organization that runs its own green jobs training programs. "We like to think that we played a role in the fact that green-collar jobs is an established concept now," he said of the Bronx movement. "Now people are seeing it as job opportunities and a way out of poverty."
The first co-op his organization got off the ground, ReBuilders Source (also in attendance), collects used building materials slated for landfills and resells them. Freilla’s other projects include a company that will produce solar water heaters and cookers and a catering service. Rooks is working with Freilla and other potential employers in the Bronx to try to match their training with local labor needs. But by its nature, the program’s success depends on forces beyond its control. "If the businesses aren’t there, then the jobs aren’t going to be there," Freilla said, adding that for now, demand for employees is not meeting the labor supply. |
