NEWARK, N.J. — Van Jones, the founder and president of Green For All, the Oakland-based nonprofit that is building national campaigns aimed at curbing global warming and oil dependence, and simultaneously creating good jobs, safer streets, and healthier communities, spoke Saturday afternoon at Newark’s Green Future Summit. His message to a group of more than 100 community activists and members of Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s staff:  “This is a very strong start.”

“You already in a one-year period have accomplished what it took four years to get to in Oakland,” said Jones, whose year-old organization was involved in organizing the summit. “You guys are connecting dots that we’re just getting to in Oakland.”

Just about this time last year, Jones arrived in the New York region with a new idea and a promising mission. During the three-day Clinton Global Initiative, held each year since 2005 in the Sheraton Hotel on New York’s 7th Avenue, Jones pitched his new organization, Green For All, which he said would be devoted to building  “a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty.”

The idea and the organization gained instant credibility. Jones had the policy chops and the street credibility. The Yale-educated lawyer and social justice activist had made a name for himself battling police misconduct in Oakland’s toughest neighborhoods. Jones has been a member of the Apollo Alliance’s board of directors since the earliest days of this organization’s founding in 2004. Jones was also building on the expertise and prominence of other African Americans who’d emerged as American environmental leaders, among them our own Apollo Alliance President Jerome Ringo, and Majora Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx (see pix below of Carter addressing the conference from Newark City Hall).

These and other African American activists  – Baye Adolfo-Wilson, a young lawyer and planner who heads up the Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District here in Newark is another – added new clarity to America’s economic, energy, environmental, and national security crises. The nation’s economic dissipation could be solved, they argued, by building a new clean energy economy driven by market opportunities, and defined at the start by social justice ideals that provide, in Jones’ own words, “pathways out of poverty.”

The true brilliance of Newark’s Green Future Summit, Jones explained in his 20-minute address, is that those ideas are now becoming embedded in the policy apparatus of this city of 280,000 residents.

Newark, led by Cory A. Booker, who graduated from Yale Law School four years after Jones did, is the first major city in the United States to pursue a clean energy, green economic development strategy precisely to combat poverty. The clean energy economy, Jones explained, can provide thousands of new green-collar jobs here while it also greens neighborhoods, develop parks, provides entrepreneurial incentives for big and small businesses, and provides benefits never before associated with American environmentalism, like making useful, career-building work possible for the more than 1,500 freed prison inmates who return home to Newark each year.

It’s not at all clear how often Booker talked about these connections with Jones or Ringo or Carter and other African Americans who’ve emerged at the head of the nation’s clean energy, good jobs campaign. But it was plain during the two-day summit that Booker has gotten the message.

“You know that Dr. King fought to racially integrate a pollution-based economy,” Jones said. “He poured his blood on the ground to integrate that economy. I say that we should be willing to make sure the next economy is an integrated economy.

“Can people who were pushed down in the pollution-based economy — can they be lifted up in the new green economy?” Jones said. “Give our young people the tools and training and technology so they can be part of the biggest economy of all time.”

“Now we are starting to see some changes,” Jones concluded. “I believe that the country is ready for a new politics out of our cities. The country is ready for change. But hope is a fragile thing. It’s one thing to have an audacious plan and another to have an audacious plan and audacious people to implement that plan.

“That is what you have in Newark. It’s not Nirvana. It’s not easy. I don’t think I will come back in a year and see happy black people in jet packs installing solar roofs.  But it’s enough to start.

“We get a chance to be in a room like this with every color in the rainbow and from the beginning have a major impact. If you do it here in Newark, the whole world will have to believe that a brighter future is available for everybody. “

– Keith Schneider

NEWARK, New Jersey — Newark’s Green Future Summit opened yesterday with Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides, Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, and other speakers making the case for installing clean energy principles to generate jobs in this upward-looking city. The issues discussed here are complex and often emotionally charged. The flow of information about jobs, building practices, labor, wages, zoning, resource recovery, clean energy and the rest requires careful attention. This is the nit and grit of urban economic development, but with a new foundation laid on environmental economics.

One of the techniques used here to help attendees establish a conference narrative is a communications platform called graphic facilitation. A young Chicago-based artist, 34-year-old Brandy Agerbeck, (see pix above) has spent nearly every hour of the conference standing on her feet, colored felt marker in hand, drawing and writing on a landscape-size stretch of white paper.

Brandy, whose work is timed to start and finish with each panel discussion, begins with a blank paper canvas. When she finishes, 60 minutes later, the canvas is a colorful display of pictures and language, arrows and boxes and circles, color-coded.  One idea links to the next, and priorities are conveyed by graphic attention and dimension. It’s a tremendously adept way to communicate big ideas that aren’t easy.

I had a chance to sit down with Brandy at the end of the day and learned more about her and graphic facilitation. Brandy told me she was raised in a Minneapolis suburb, educated at Grinnell College in Iowa where she studied art and printmaking. Graphic facilitation was founded on the West Coast 30 years ago, Brandy said, and gained credibility largely because of the work The Grove, a consulting firm in San Francisco that specializes in “visual planning and organization change.” Most American graphic facilitators still practice their craft on the West Coast, where they helped form a trade group, the International Forum of Visual Practitioners.

Brandy is one of nine graphic facilitators in the Midwest, she says, and has been in practice for 12 years. Three years ago she developed a curriculum and also began teaching the craft. 

Congress this week took up legislation to decide America’s energy future.  The question in Washington is the same as it is in the presidential campaign - “drill baby drill” or a policy that promotes real solutions, a plan for a reasoned future that invests in clean energy and good jobs.

The Apollo Alliance is pushing back against drilling proposals that won’t solve our energy crisis and promoting a much better one that will, our own The New Apollo Program. The New Apollo Program is a comprehensive national economic development strategy to scale up and accelerate development of the clean energy sector and create millions of green-collar jobs.

In pursuit of those goals, this week we published a careful analysis that compares the proposals in The New Apollo Program with those put forward in Barack Obama’s New Energy For America Plan, and John McCain’s The Lexington Project.

We also sent an email alert to you and thousands of our other supporters urging you to help alert Congress that more domestic drilling is no solution to the energy, economic, security, and climate crises buffeting the nation. Please make your views known, and pass the alert onto friends and family.

And today we are in Newark, New Jersey for the first of the two-day Newark’s Green Future Summit, which the Apollo Alliance and Mayor Cory A. Booker (pix right with Phil Angelides) organized with the help of a number of other national and local organizations.

The idea of the summit, which was nearly a year in the making, was twofold. First, to bring Newark’s diverse talent and experience together with leaders from other communities to develop a roadmap for sustainable development. And second, to support the city in developing green urban initiatives - integrating green buildings into energy-efficient neighborhoods, developing new parks, fostering business development in clean energy that produces green-collar jobs, greening the Newark port - that create jobs, increase community welfare, and expand economic opportunity.

The Alliance’s work to help organize Newark’s Green Future Summit is a feature of The New Apollo Program. The program’s entire focus is reducing pollution, increasing efficiency, providing good jobs, and expanding opportunity for all. “Newark is a model of how older industrial cities can take the lead in moving this country toward a future of clean energy and good jobs,” said Apollo Co-Director Kate Gordon, who spent countless hours helping to plan and organize the event and is a summit speaker. Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides and President Jerome Ringo also are speaking here.

Thanks so much for being a part. The question I’d like you to consider for next week’s online Feedback feature is how are people where you live responding to calls for a national energy strategy that promotes clean energy and jobs, or the competing “drill baby drill?” What strategy and message reaches people in this great moment to choose?

– Keith Schneider