New York City’s Green Roadmap out of Recession
Urban Agenda, the convenor of the New York City Apollo Alliance, also established the The Green Collar Jobs Roundtable, a multi-stakeholder New York City-based campaign. Recently, the Roundtable released its Roadmap—a strategy to ensure that the green economy’s growth creates broadly shared prosperity for businesses, communities and workers in New York City. The Roadmap offers more than 30 recommendations on how a coordinated, city-wide agenda that advances sustainability initiatives and prepares New Yorkers for green collar jobs can be a cornerstone of strategies to navigate New York City out of today’s recession.
The Roundtable is a participatory effort of over 170 job-training organizations, community-based programs, businesses, and labor unions. Over a year, data on green jobs and workforce development best practices were collected, with working groups looking at all aspects of the green economy including the current landscape, training, employers, job standards, and target populations. The findings point to the city’s existing lack of training, recruitment, business services, pre-employment, and job-readiness infrastructure to meet ambitious sustainability goals and further develop emerging high-growth green sectors.
“The Roadmap addresses this issue head-on,” said J.Mijin Cha, Director of Campaign Research at Urban Agenda, and chief coordinator of the report. “It spells out our collective vision, which is an inclusive green economy that employs thousands of New Yorkers in good, green jobs that help upgrade our infrastructure, improve the health of our communities, and reduce the country’s reliance on imported energy that degrades the environment.”
“Environmental sustainability is only half of this vision,” stressed Edward Ott, Chair of the NYC Apollo Alliance, “equally important is that green collar jobs are also good jobs that offer family-supporting wages, benefits, and opportunities for career advancement.” The NYC Apollo Alliance is a coalition of labor, environmentalists and environmental justice advocates, businesses, educators and community-based groups advocating for public policies that target job creation and environmental stewardship.
This Roadmap is an exciting development for New York City and a great example of making real the Apollo Alliance’s vision. The Roadmap’s comprehensive approach and multi-stakeholder participation is an impressive example for other cities across America on how to chart a sustainable and equitable economic future.
You can visit Urban Agenda’s website to read both the Executive Summary or the full report here.