Jake Douglas Boren (HOPE Program) on green jobs for barriered New Yorkers
Jake Douglas Boren of the HOPE Program describes training New Yorkers overcoming homelessness, incarceration, and other barriers for green construction and building operations careers. He calls for requiring developers and contractors benefiting from city subsidies to partner with community-based training programs as a condition, and for investing in social enterprise models.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jaco Douglas-Born, Chief Program Officer at the HOPE Program, a 40-year-old workforce development organization in Hunts Point and downtown Brooklyn.
We train New Yorkers overcoming the steepest barriers, homelessness, incarceration, domestic violence, long-term unemployment, especially from neighborhoods and communities facing compounding environmental harm.
We prepare them for careers in green construction, building operations and maintenance, horticulture and cool roofs.
We are a founding member of the Green Economy Network.
New York City has a jobs problem and a climate problem.
The solution to one can help solve the other, but only if we are intentional about whose jobs we mean.
Green jobs have something essential going for them.
They are here, they are accessible, and they pay.
They can be outsourced overseas, they don't require years of credentialing debt, and they are rooted in the same communities our participants come from.
That's good climate policy and also a lifeline for New York City residents.
The infrastructure for this work already exists in community-based organizations, workforce training providers, and labor partnerships that have spent decades proving it out.
We should be front and center in delivering this plan, not competing at the margins of large public contracts.
Social enterprise is one powerful proof of that model.
Enterprises generate revenue, hire program graduates directly, and meet real industry demands.
All at once.
It's a self-reinforcing cycle that doesn't depend on the next grant cycle.
The city should be actively investing in and incentivizing this model.
What we also ask, every developer, property owner, and contractor that benefits from city subsidy,
tax incentives, capital funding, free services like cool roofs, should be required to partner with and hire from community-based training programs, not as a suggestion, as a condition.
The coalitions are organized, the people we serve are ready, the city has begun to lay the groundwork, now it is time to go deeper.
Thank you.