| IN THE NEWS
Seeds for L.A. Jobs Program Planted Years Ago
By Claudia Rowe
February 1, 2010
Of all the job-creation efforts cropping up under the heading “green,” few have the breadth and ambition of a Los Angeles plan to employ dozens of marginalized workers by transforming outdated city buildings into models of energy efficiency.
On its face, the Los Angeles Green Retrofit program looks straightforward: It will use $16 million in stimulus funds to train an initial round of 60 people for retrofitting municipal buildings – everything from senior centers to office parks – employing those workers on jobs that may last a half decade. But the political maneuvering required was infinitely complex.
For more than four years, community members went door to door, gathering signatures in economically struggling South Los Angeles to support bringing green jobs to the inner city. Meanwhile, 25 organizations, each with its own agenda and interests, came together as the Los Angeles Apollo Alliance to propose a nuts-and-bolts plan that would make it happen.
In the end, the coalition was so massive – representing environmentalists, labor organizations, social justice groups and some 5,000 city residents – that City Hall could hardly ignore its wishes.
“They had a pretty big voice, which was nice,” said Krista Kline, urban planning and design coordinator in the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development. “It made it easy for the Electeds to say, ‘Well, you’ve got everybody on board, so we’re with you.’ The alliance did all that heavy lifting, putting their coalition together.”
Now it’s “written in stone” – or at least the municipal equivalent: The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance last year that explicitly links the project to training programs targeting disadvantaged communities, while ensuring that the work occurs in low-income neighborhoods and uses union labor.
From the perspective of City Hall, the ordinance was key to the initiative’s success. Although other methods might have been faster – working with an individual councilman, for instance, or with a specific city department – the Apollo Alliance used a legislative process, thus ensuring that the program will extend past the vagaries of annual election cycles .
“They created a whole new coalition of greenies and labor,” Kline said. “Enough people who were invested in seeing it done and who are not going to let up until it is. In other cities, Electeds get distracted and go somewhere else. Here, they’re not letting us do that, which is very smart of them.”
The planning began in 2006, long before the term “stimulus” had become part of the national vocabulary, and years before Barak Obama was a household name. The unlikely coalition of California activists came together to discuss the future and agreed that it looked distinctly green. Not that “green” meant the same thing to each. Between science from the Sierra Club, legal lingo from labor unions and the policy shorthand used by community action groups, early meetings of the Los Angeles Apollo Alliance sounded something like a Tower of Babel.
“We had to kind of devise a new language to talk to each other,” said Elsa Barboza, campaign director for the Equal Voice community group SCOPE (Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education), which led the effort. "The enviros and labor unions had always been on opposite sides. But there was really an excitement -- you could feel it in your stomach -- that this was something new, and needed."
From the beginning, however, the alliance united around a belief that the best way to address poverty was through job creation.
“These are huge issues, but we knew this day would come,” Barboza said. “We knew that ‘green jobs’ was an economic trend, and we knew we needed to start way ahead of time. The reason it worked for us is we had a long-term vision.”
Retired postal worker Anita Thomas is one among dozens of volunteers who watched the Green Retrofit program evolve from concept to reality in front of her eyes. For months she knocked on doors, educating her neighbors in South Los Angeles about green energy and the potential it held for job creation. Many doubted that solar power was conceivable in the inner city. “Some people said ‘It’s never going to work because the city will never go green,’” Thomas recalled. “Other people said ‘Well, maybe in the future.’ And I’d say to them, ‘The future is now.’“
Weekly, she struggled to convince the skeptical, urging them to press government officials for change. “The whole point was not to depend on entrepreneurs and outside sources – we needed to do this ourselves,” she said. “I’d let people know that they can empower themselves, go to the city and ask for green energy and green jobs. We, as the community, have to hold our elected officials accountable. That’s where we kind of are right now, making sure that this ordinance that was passed is going to go into effect.”
At City Hall, urban planning and design coordinator Kline said she expects the first training class to start in July. Work could begin six months afterward.
Yet in other parts of the country, community groups typically find themselves scrambling to devise programs at the last minute, often competing against well-staffed, grant-savvy contractors. “I get calls weekly – ‘Hey, we’re writing a proposal, will you partner with us? And by the way, what is a green job?’” said Barboza. “It’s unfortunate. There’s all this money, all these dollars, and folks who don’t know anything about green jobs wanting to do trainings.”
Vien Truong, a policy analyst at the national green-economy group Green For All, agrees: “There’s this rush to create green jobs and green jobs training, and we just need to make sure that we’re doing it thoughtfully,” she said. “We can’t let this hope turn into hype.”
Essential to the Apollo Alliance’s success has been the deep relationships it built, slowly and over time, with city officials. “They call me up constantly – ‘When are we meeting? You haven’t done anything for two weeks, what’s going on?’” Kline said. “And that’s exactly what they should be doing.”
Barboza has read the disheartening accounts of jobs that don’t exist beyond a few weeks. She shakes her head to see billions of dollars funneled toward the usual players. But she holds fast to the belief that in Los Angeles, at least, the green economy will look different.
“Because of the foundation that we’ve been able to put down and the work that we’ve done winning the political power and organizing to make it happen, things are, hopefully, going to look better here,” she said. “It’s resulted in organizing a different face to this Green Jobs Movement. Now we need to make sure we keep everybody’s eyes on the prize.”
 |
| The Los Angeles Apollo Alliance is made up of 25 community organizations, labor unions and environmental organizations. Here SCOPE campaign director Elsa Barboza discusses the retrofit ordinance with an Alliance member from IBEW local 11. |
 |
| Los Angeles Councilmember Eric Garcetti with South Los Angeles AGENDA Community Leaders Clementina Lopez and Barbara Gate |
 |
| South Los Angeles community members visit the Audubon Center at Debs Park, a LEED Platinum facility to learn more about green building technology. |
 |
| Shomari Davis from IBEW 11 installs solar panels on homes in South Los Angeles. |
Click to read the report