New York City
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In partnership with |
CONTACT
Mijin Cha
Policy Director
mijin@urbanagenda.org
Urban Agenda is spearheading the NYC Apollo Alliance, a new and growing coalition of labor unions, environmental justice advocates, business leaders, community organizations, and educators. NYC Apollo seeks to transform the way New York City is powered in order to create jobs, improve residents’ health and productivity, promote equity, and ensure New York maintains its status as the preeminent global city.
Recent Success!
Urban Agenda, the convener 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 learn more here.
Past Events
Urban Agenda and Apollo president, Jerome Ringo, held a public forum to discuss how federal action could affect New York CIty on February 2, 2009. J. Mijin Cha, the director of campaign research at Urban Agenda, argued in the Gotham Gazette that creating green-collar jobs is not enough to turn around our economy, and “we must create “green collar” jobs that pay well, provide health benefits and offer opportunities for career advancement while improving our environment.” The point was underscored by Jerome Ringo, president of the national Apollo Alliance, who introduced the New Apollo Program, a bold economic investment plan that seeks to build on America’s strengths – ‘our infrastructure, workforce, entrepreneurship, and can-do spirit’. The plan has been gaining momentum in Washington since it was made public in September 2008 – “in fact, much of the federal stimulus package echoes what we’re saying,” said Ringo.
We organized an energy forum on Nov. 18, 2008, to discuss NYC’s energy future. Representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Agency, ConEdison, NYC Economic Development Corporation, and elsewhere discussed the future of conventional and renewable energy sources in NYC.
WHAT’S IN THE WORKS
We are working with the City Council on energy efficiency and green buildings legislation. The legislation aims to implement benchmarking and energy auditing requirements. NYC Apollo Alliance wants to ensure that the legislation incorporates best practices and supports the development of quality green-collar jobs.
