Green Jobs: Good Work If Youth Can Find It

In the fall of 2004, then-college student Julian Mocine-McQueen was
outraged that the prosperous city of San Francisco was doing little to
prevent or talk about the high rate of homicides among young
African-American and Latino men. So he started organizing young people
around violence prevention programs through the League of Young Voters,
a national voter engagement organization that also supports community
organizers working with low-income youth. He had no idea that in a few
years he would move from violence prevention to environmental justice.
Mocine-McQueen, 28, is now a field organizer with Green For All, a
national advocacy organization dedicated to supporting local activists
in their efforts to improve their neighborhoods through energy
conservation and job-creation initiatives. "Green jobs allowed me to
address the root causes of violence--no jobs, no money," he explains.

On February 4 Mocine-McQueen is heading to Good Jobs, Green Jobs--a
conference in Washington, DC, where more than 1,000 labor leaders will
learn tactics on how to press the government to expand markets for green
jobs. He will hold sessions that emphasize building a more inclusive
economy--one that creates wealth-building opportunities for historically
neglected, low-income communities of color. He is encouraged to see the
growing numbers of supportive labor groups across the country who
recognize the need to diversify their ranks.

Then, from February 27 to March 2, Mocine-McQueen will attend Power
Shift 2009, a gathering of more than 10,000 young environmental
activists, also in Washington, put together by the Energy Action
Coalition (EAC) in partnership with fifty of its membership
organizations, including Green For All. "As future inheritors of this
planet, young people get the urgency of this problem," says Jessy
Tolkan, EAC's executive director. In 2007 Power Shift--part political
rally, part concert, part K Street-style lobbying day--brought more than
6,000 young people to Washington. The event helped firmly plant the
concept of green jobs within the organizing landscape of young climate
change activists. "That message of green jobs is really sticking with
young people, because it is so solutions-oriented," Tolkan explains. A
proof of its growing appeal: EAC's e-mail list has grown from 10,000 to
500,000 since 2007.

But the impact of the student green jobs movement should also be
measured in the powerful change it has brought to lives and communities.
Take Pittsburgh native Chester Thrower III. The first time he heard of
"green jobs" was a year ago. He Googled the term and found videos of the
idea's fiercest preacher, Green For All founder Van Jones. It wasn't the
first time Thrower heard outsiders promising jobs for Pittsburgh's
predominantly African-American neighborhoods, where the unemployment
rate for males has been among the highest in the nation for decades. But
this time it felt different. Jones struck a chord within him. Jones told
Thrower that he could be an entrepreneur, that he could run his own
business someday.

Thrower was inspired. He could think of only four people who own small
businesses in the Manchester neighborhood of Pittsburgh where he grew
up. The rest worked primarily in service industries, making minimum
wage. His friend Khari Mosley from the League of Young Voters helped him
enroll in the Green For All Academy late last year so he could hear
Jones speak in person. There, Jones laid out some potential paths for
Thrower's dream of becoming his own boss. What really moved Thrower to
action was the realization that with this business, he would also have
the power to give something back to his neighborhood. He could give
unemployed young people on Pittsburgh's street corners good jobs
retrofitting old, polluted buildings and installing solar panels. "That
enlightened me and got me interested in the solar panels," Thrower
recalls. "I figure the sun is always going to be here, and I could learn
to harness that somehow."

In February Thrower will be taking a ten-week class on solar panel
installation that will cost him only $350, including books--much less
than a vocational certificate or college degree. The class will be
taught by the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 95 in
Pittsburgh. Thrower plans to work with the League of Young Voters to
create more classes like these targeted at young people in urban,
working-class neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.

Thrower sees green jobs as the best way to stop drug-related violence in
Pittsburgh. For more than a year, he worked as a community organizer in
Manchester, and almost every young person he approached asked him, "Can
you get me a job?" Thrower felt powerless as he watched young people
sell drugs to help their parents pay their bills.

Nationally, there are about 1.7 million low-income youths (16 to 24) who
were out of school and out of work in 2005, according to a report by the
Center for American Progress. Many of them live in areas of concentrated
poverty and are often striving for precious few opportunities that the
corporate media glorify--rap stars, professional athletes. When Thrower
tells young people in Manchester about green jobs, "it goes in one ear
and out the other." Despite this, he is confident that once he starts to
put solar panels up in his neighborhood, he'll become a tangible new
role model young people will want to emulate.

The trouble is: there are no solar installation jobs in Manchester for
Thrower right now. That's why he is working with the League of Young
Voters to lobby for job-training support and energy efficiency grants
from the city, state and federal government that will help create the
demand for these newly trained workers. "The time is now," Thrower says,
raising his voice. "If low-income people are not aware and are not
exposed to these opportunities right now, two, three years later it may
be too late. We may get shut out of the process again."

While local leaders like Thrower and Mocine-McQueen work to build
awareness about green jobs block by block, and groups like Green For All
build alliances between traditional blue-collar workers and lower-income
communities of color, EAC adds a powerful punch to this cause from the
nation's campuses. The result is the largest and most diverse youth and
student movement in the country. Young voters were a key constituency in
the election of this country's first African-American president, and
thousands of Power Shift 2009 activists will let Congress know that this
powerful voting bloc expects not only substantive investments in the
transition to a green economy but also explicit provisions for green job
growth for unemployed youth.

Youth organizers, who work on the margins of American society to
eliminate racism and poverty through issues like prison and public
school reforms, haven't had so much reason for hope in a long time. The
growing popularity of energy conservation and green jobs among people of
all ages and backgrounds, the openness among some moderate Republicans
to a green economy as a pathway to more entrepreneurship and innovation,
and the urgent need to come up with an economic recovery plan present
the potential for a perfect political storm. This unprecedented
coalition, standing at a historic crossroads, might just create enough
of a critical mass to push through something that finally benefits
working-class youth in communities like Manchester.