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Brownfields Job Training Grants: Turning the Problem
into the Solution
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Students
training in Boston |
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| Gary
Kaplan, executive director of JFYNetWorks, EPA New England deputy regional
administrator Ira W. Leighton, and New Bedford, Mass., Mayor Frederick M. Kalisz, Jr., at Brownfields 2004, where Mayor Kalisz announced that New Bedford is forming a partnership with JFYNetWorks. |
The U.S. EPA has figured out that to tackle environmental cleanup and remediation of brownfield sites in economically depressed areas, they can turn what is perceived to be the problem into the solution.
They have started a national program that gives grant money to nonprofit environmental remediation programs around the country that train unemployed or underemployed people for skilled jobs and put them to work cleaning up contaminated areas in large urban areas and some smaller rural ones. It is producing results.
The spring 2004 round of these Brownfields Job Training Grants is putting about 1,000 people otherwise stuck in low-paying jobs or unemployed into government-certified training programs in 16 communities, the EPA says. Graduates, usually from poor urban areas, are equipped with skills immediately marketable in cleaning neglected, contaminated areas in their own communities for reuse, and detecting and removing hazardous materials from construction sites or offices that would otherwise make those work areas unsafe. The government has awarded 82 grants since it started the program in 1998.
“For EPA to be funding these things is a damn good thing,” said Gary Kaplan, whose program in the Boston area, formerly called Jobs for Youth, has been using its $200,000 grant to finance its efforts for years. The program has put 250 people to work in the Boston area and is now under the new umbrella organization name JFY Networks.
“If nobody’s making any money, there’s a problem there,” Kaplan went on. “EPA made the theoretical connection between the need and the job; train people in the area/neighborhood for the work, give them the job, they can clean it up.”