Hanif asks about disability inclusion in Green Economy Action Plan

Hi, thanks for being here this afternoon.

I'll start with some questions about the inclusion of people with disabilities in the Green Economy Action Plan.

The plan emphasizes creating an equitable workforce.

How has the city ensured that people with disabilities are included in that vision?

And are there any specific goals or benchmarks for their participation in green economy jobs?

Thanks, Councilmember, for the question.

I'm happy to answer first and pass it to my colleague.

As I mentioned before, we're pretty bullish about enabling workers to enter into good paying jobs in the green economy.

That starts with career awareness.

And so the education center that we built in partnership with Econor that is at Industry City was developed in partnership with disability advocates to ensure that all of the materials are accessible

to a broad variety of individuals, both across language, but also across ability.

But that doesn't cover...

The job part.

And so we don't have any codified goals for that, but it is part and parcel of our approach to inclusive and equitable workforce development.

But I'll pass it to my colleague.

If there aren't benchmarks, how do you know that this is equitable?

So, like my colleague said, we don't have specific benchmarks tied to goals for jobs for people with disabilities, but at NYC Talent, we're home to the Center for Workplace Accessibility and Inclusion, and the way that we think about

workforce accessibility and inclusion is making sure that all types of jobs are available and accessible to people with disabilities, and so we work across all types of sectors, and

particularly with the green economy, right, there's a broad type of, as was noted earlier in the testimony and in the report itself, a broad spectrum of jobs that contribute to the green economy.

And so part of the work of our team at QI is to work with our partners across the city, whether that's the city agencies and partners external, to make sure that there's opportunities open for people with disabilities.

But at this moment, you are not evaluating whether people with disabilities have been connected to a job.

We're tracking, we actually do track towards connecting people with disabilities towards jobs.

We have yet to slice that specifically in the green economy, but we're happy to take that back and happy to also work with you, council member, on ways that we can better track that.

But we do work towards tracking across the various city programming and connecting people with disabilities to jobs.