Seeing Green: New Jobs
Lead To New Visions

East Harlem — Shawn H. Mungin did not really know what green-collar meant when he decided to turn his life around. After serving a six-year prison sentence, he felt distant from the ever-evolving culture, and had no reason to think he would be a part of anything called the green economy. That all changed one night last winter at the Henry Street Settlement House on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where a guest speaker inspired him to embark on a new journey.

Mungin, 33, had been seeking a way to recover his pride and the respect of his family. He also sensed a need to connect with something larger than himself – something that would allow him to make a positive contribution to society. The transformative speaker came from an organization that provides workforce training to people with significant employment barriers – and that training, of late, has become focused on green-collar employment. The speaker, Emmanuel Pacheco, a program coordinator from Strive in East Harlem, left Mungin feeling that a career in green construction offered a chance to change himself while, in some way, changing the world.

At about the same time, East Harlem resident Shaunteé Linnen was looking for a way to push her life out of second gear. She was also seeking direction and new challenges. But unlike Mungin, she has been green-minded for most of her life. Linnen, 29, became fascinated with science as a high school student at the Academy of Environmental Science in East Harlem, learning about plant stewardship and attending environmental programs at the United Nations.

Yet Linnen’s interest in the environment remained disconnected from professional aspirations. She was skeptical about whether her passion for the environment could create a practical pathway to a better life. Her participation in Strive’s green construction program, where she met and became friends with Mungin, changed that outlook completely.

Thus far, they have spent seven weeks gaining job readiness skills while learning about weatherization, asbestos abatement, LEED certification, energy efficiency, photovoltaics, and many other concepts that are intended to furnish a well-rounded understanding of the green construction industry.

Mungin, Linnen, and several other students attended a press conference last month where the EPA announced that it would be contributing $200,000 to Strive in a competitive grant that is aimed to assist brownfield remediation workforce development programs in low-income areas. George Pavlou, the acting administrator for EPA Region 2, said that “when you talk about the environment, it’s not just about the world, but neighborhoods as well.” He said the EPA’s grant is not an isolated gesture, as stimulus funding should soon provide millions of dollars to strengthen community-based workforce training programs oriented to green-collar jobs.
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Building Green Consciousness

Students in similar workforce training programs – at Sustainable South Bronx in Hunts Point and St. Nicks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for instance – typically come from many low-income neighborhoods scattered throughout the five boroughs. Quite often, these areas – whether located in the Bronx, Queens, or Manhattan – are disproportionately saturated with industry and its accompanying pollutants, which include waste treatment facilities, MTA bus depots, and unused contaminated land. The high asthma rates in Hunts Point, as well as the rows of public housing towers that overlook fuming expressways, also exemplify the ways in which environmental burdens are not shared equally.