Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities

Publication outlines strategies for developing green-collar job initiatives and pathways out of poverty at the local level.

Green For All, in partnership with the Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress, and the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, recently released this guide to help cities across America develop strategies to spur the creation of green-collar jobs and opportunity in their communities.

The new guide, Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities: Building Pathways out of Poverty and Careers in the Clean Energy Economy, is a first-of-its-kind publication that addresses the demand for this information and outlines a strategic framework in which local policymakers and advocates can develop a green-collar job initiative that responds to the realities of their local economies and communities. 

“Our green future will be invented at the local level,” said Van Jones, founder and president of Green For All.  “This report offers those leaders some of the best thinking and models currently available for building green-collar jobs and the training pipelines necessary for city residents to fill those jobs and claim the promise of living wage careers.”

The guide encourages cities to take a four-step approach.

1. First, set a baseline to start from. Identify your environmental and economic goals, and assess local and regional opportunities for achieving those goals.
2. Second, develop a green economic development plan.  Enact policies and programs to drive investment into targeted green economic activity and increase demand for local green-collar workers.
3. Third, ready your workforce.  Prepare your green-collar workforce by building green-collar job training partnerships to identify and meet workforce training needs, and by creating green pathways out of poverty that focus on recruitment, job readiness, job training, and job placement for low-income residents.
4. And fourth, build on your successes.  Leverage your program’s success to build political support for new and bolder policies and initiatives.

Green-Collar Jobs in America's Cities also includes 14 case studies of successful green-collar job training or policy in 11 communities on both coasts, the Midwest, and the South. 
 
We are on the cusp of incredible change.  People everywhere are now talking about the promise of green-collar jobs to serve both the planet and the people.  We hope that this publication helps people in cities across the country realize their own dreams of a strong green economy that provides pathways to prosperity for people in need.