The Ella Baker Center - Green Jobs Campaign

The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights has launched a green jobs campaign. The Oakland-based group "creates opportunities in the green economy for low-income people and people of color," working to solve social problems by training a Green Jobs Corps with soft and hard skills to work in the up-and-coming clean tech sector (green building and renewable energy). The Campaign aims to connect lower-income individuals to environmental issues that have, in the past, been concerns only of the wealthy. The City of Oakland gave $250,000 to the program in 2007, and the Green for All initiative was presented to the Clinton Global Initiative in the fall of last year.



While environmentalism has been an overwhelmingly white phenomenon (as discussed in Van Jones's "Unbearable Whiteness of Green"), the Campaign works to promote "Green Cities for Brown People" (as their recent conference was called).

As Van Jones says, "With murder rates soaring and employment rates plummeting, Oakland is in a literal do-or-die struggle to build a sustainable local living economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty."

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