© Progressive Christians Uniting
Articles on Van Jones:
Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times Op-Ed
Van Jones is a rare bird. He’s a black social activist in Oakland, Calif., and as green an environmentalist as they come. He really gets passionate, and funny, when he talks about what it’s like to be black and green: “Try this experiment. Go knock on someone’s door in West Oakland, Watts or Newark and say: ‘We gotta really big problem!’ They say: ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta really big problem!’ ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but we gotta save the polar bears!’ ”
Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker
A few months ago, Van Jones, the founder and president of a group called Green for All, went to visit New Bedford, Massachusetts. His first stop of the day was the public library, where someone had assembled an audience of about thirty high-school dropouts. They leaned back in their chairs, hands in the pockets of their oversized sweatshirts. A few appeared to be stoned.
Jones, who is forty, is tall and imposing, with a shaved head and a patchy goatee. He wears rimless glasses and favors dark clothing. On this particular day, he was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, black boots, and a charcoal jacket. He was introduced by a community organizer and aspiring rapper, who described him as “a leader with answers,” a “genius from the hood, similar to our own,” and a youthful version of Barack Obama. When it was his turn to speak, Jones rejected the lectern that had been set up for him, saying that it reminded him too much of college.
“I love Barack Obama,” he said. “I’d pay money just to shine the brother’s shoes. But I’ll tell you this. Do you hear me? One man is not going to save us. I don’t care who that man is. He’s not going to save us. And, in fact, if you want to be real about this—can y’all take it? I’m going to be real with y’all. Not only is Barack Obama not going to be able to save you—you are going to have to save Barack Obama.”
Terrence McNally
The Huffington Post
VAN JONES received the $100,000 2008 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship in New York City December 8th. Hamilton Fish, President of The Nation Institute, said, "In a year of change, Van Jones offers an integrated, progressive blueprint that simultaneously promotes jobs, environmental stewardship, and economic progress. He has arrived to pull us back from the brink."
The economy is in crisis. Unemployment is rising. Families are hurting. Despite recent drops in oil prices, the days of cheap gas and oil are numbered. Climate change calls for massive changes in the way we supply and use energy. VAN JONES believes that these crises are connected and that together they present an enormous opportunity. JONES is the founder and president of GREEN FOR ALL and author of THE GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY.
Van Jones
The Huffington Post
President-elect Barack Obama got it right when he announced Representative Hilda Solis as his pick for the next secretary of labor. Headlines are heralding her as the first Latino to hold the post. But the green jobs movement is jumping for joy not only because she's brown. It's because she's green. Through Solis, Obama makes clear his commitment to creating green jobs to lift the nation out of its current economic crisis.
We're thrilled that Hilda Solis shares the green jobs vision. In fact, she's already helped make it real. Rep. Solis was the original author of the Green Jobs Act, and our Green For All team worked closely with her in 2007. During that year's Congressional session, she worked with colleagues on both sides of the aisle and was instrumental in getting that hallmark legislation passed. Her work demonstrated her commitment to a socially responsible, clean-energy economy that will create millions of good-paying jobs and save our environment. She is the right secretary of labor to take advantage of a great opportunity not only to make America's economy stronger by making it greener, but also to make Americans living in poverty part of a revitalized middle class.
Michael Elliott
Time Magazine
Oakland and Marin County, Calif., both look out onto San Francisco Bay. But that sublime body of water apart, the gritty port city and the New Age, crystal-gazing county, where (legend has it) the hot tub was invented, might be on different planets. Van Jones is trying to bring them together — and help the U.S. think about how to build a green economy in a new way.
Jones, 39, an African-American activist based in Oakland, started visiting Marin when he was burned out from years of running programs to find jobs for kids fresh out of jail. What he saw, he says, was a form of "eco-apartheid." In Oakland, his neighbors, working hardscrabble jobs when they could find them, had to deal with the sort of industrial pollution that brings asthma attacks. In pristine Marin, just a few miles away, a whole new economy was being built around organic food, solar-panel installation and the like. Jones' insight was to see that if the two sides of the Bay could be brought together, the economy of both would benefit. The result of that insight is Green For All, the pressure group that Jones leads. It's dedicated, as he puts it, to providing a "path to prosperity" for blue-collar workers, training them for jobs and skills that will be in demand when (or maybe if) the U.S. retrofits itself as a low-carbon economy. "We can beat pollution and poverty at the same time," Jones says. "Fighting climate change is the closest thing to a full-employment program we've ever seen in this country."
Linda Baker
Fast Company
The cheering would begin soon enough. Dressed in a slim-cut gray suit and green tie, Van Jones ascended to the stage grinning and blowing kisses to the crowd. Jones, 39, a 6-foot-1-inch Yale Law grad, was appearing at a summit in San Francisco called "Advancing a New Energy Economy in California." The city's charismatic mayor, Gavin Newsom, was among the presenters, along with corporate bigwigs such as PG&E chief executive Peter Darbee. But no one would outshine Jones.
"What is considered green is usually for the eco-elite," he preached to the assembled solar entrepreneurs, environmental activists, and community leaders (including more than a dozen black clergymen). "But if we are actually going to meet the challenge of global warming, we are going to have to weatherize millions of homes and install millions of solar panels. That's millions of new jobs. We need to connect the people who most need the work with the work that most needs to be done." It's one of his favorite themes: the need to expand the green movement beyond "lifestyle environmentalists," with their hybrid cars and other eco-status symbols. The audience cheered. "Van Jones, he's a rock star," says Tim Rainey, director of economic development at the California Labor Federation.
Maywa Montenegro
GOOD Magazine
When California voters went to the polls in November, 2006, they had the chance to pass a historic measure, taxing the oil industry to pay for research on clean energy. Hollywood spent $40 million on a “yes” campaign, and it had big-name endorsements from Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Google’s Larry Page. But while Tinseltown lent star power, the oil industry placed ads in several black-owned newspapers showing an African-American woman looking horrified at gas prices as she refueled her car. Soon after, the leader of the NAACP came out against the proposition. It failed to pass.
For Van Jones, a 39-year-old civil-rights lawyer in Oakland, California, watching these events unfold was frustrating, but not surprising. What environmentalists fail to realize, he says, is that “for people who live in personal crisis, telling them about a planetary crisis is just demoralizing. You need to talk to these people about opportunity.”
Douglas Cruickshank
Edutopia.com
The way you "create a green pathway out of poverty is, you line up your green-job seekers with your green-job trainers with your green-job creators," Van Jones says. It is, Jones believes, not merely the key to a sustainable future but also the future, and a highly worthwhile one, for the many underprivileged young people entering the workforce without college degrees.
The future is something Jones, a 1993 Yale Law School graduate, thinks about a lot. He's also been doing something about it for much of his adult life. He's the founding president of Green for All, an organization in Oakland, California, focused on building what he calls "a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty." In 1996, Jones cofounded Oakland's Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and for years he has been a key figure in battling social inequality and environmental destruction through an array of advocacy organizations. His work has been acknowledged with a Reebok Human Rights Award, his selection as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellowship.
