Small businesses often struggle to find the capital they need get going or to go to scale. Raising capital from traditional investors can be particularly difficult for innovative green businesses that are concerned as much about people and planet as they are about profit. Minority-owned firms face additional, well-documented obstacles accessing capital from conventional sources. But new trends and recent legal developments are creating opportunities for small businesses to raise capital directly from the communities they serve. Green For All has created this report to serve as a resource for entrepreneurs interested in exploring crowdfunding as way to grow businesses that make their communities and our country stronger, healthier, and more inclusive.

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Seeing Green reveals that 219 jobs and economic activity in the range of $23 million will be created by Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District’s (NEORSD) green infrastructure investments. The jobs created to maintain green infrastructure will be sustainable jobs with dedicated funding through NEORSD. It has been shown on a national-level that green infrastructure jobs present an entry point into the workforce that has a relatively low barriers. This represents future potential to create a workforce development program that can target specific populations with historic barriers to employment in the Cleveland area. The report recommend that NEORSD, the City of Cleveland, and private institutions hire graduates of workforce programs for green infrastructure maintenance needs in order to realize true community benefits from public and private investments.

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In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, Kareem Dale was working in Houston as a project manager for a construction company. It was a good job, but he sometimes wondered if there was something else out there—something more gratifying. 

As more communities move towards adopting green infrastructure as a cost-effective approach to manage polluted runoff, it is critical that local governments address barriers to operations and maintenance. American Rivers and Green For All collaborated to develop Staying Green: Strategies to Improve Operations and Maintenance of Green Infrastructure in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, which highlights existing information related to costs of green infrastructure maintenance, identifies the significant barriers to effective operations and maintenance of these practices, recommends strategies to improve operations and maintenance, and provides resources and case studies that local governments can use as models.

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The operations and maintenance of green infrastructure represents a significant opportunity to create entry-level jobs in the green sector for individuals from disadvantaged communities. In the coming years, thousands of new green infrastructure projects will be installed throughout the country. They will require a workforce trained to maintain and monitor the projects. Developed by Green For All in partnership with American Rivers, Staying Green and Growing Jobs: Green Infrastructure Operations and Maintenance as Career Pathway Stepping Stones reveals that water utilities investing in green infrastructure can outsource operations and maintenance work to workforce development programs that train individuals in green infrastructure – in fact, some already do. Operations and maintenance work gives disadvantaged community members access to jobs and career on-ramps while performing the work required by water utilities.

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Cross-posted on Clean Technica. Read original post here.

Some 110,000 new jobs could result from the more than 300 clean energy and clean transportation projects announced in the US in 2012, according to a new report from Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), “a national community of individual business leaders who advocate for good environmental policy while building economic prosperity.” 

This tool is a resource for all stakeholders promoting the use of green infrastructure using a jobs framework. Find persuasive data points and effective communication strategies to persuade decision makers to increase green infrastructure investments.

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