On the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 100 homes and a public school stood on Love Canal — an unfitting name for a ditch filled with industrial waste that had been covered over with earth and sold for $1. The three blocks of working-class households looked like any other community, but in basements and backyards, residents found carcinogenic compounds seeping through the soil, leached out of the rotting drum containers buried underneath.
“Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals,” recounts Eckardt Beck, an EPA administrator in the 1970s. “Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play[ing] with burns on their hands and faces.”
The environmental calamity at Love Canal prompted officials to launch a national cleanup of the country’s most toxic wastelands. The program — the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund, named for a trust fund bolstered by taxes on petroleum and chemical products — promised long-term remediation for dangerous sites and gave the agency power to bill offending companies for the costs. Since its inception in 1981, 387 sites have been officially cleared. But chronic underfunding — the petro-chemical taxes expired in 1995 — has weakened the EPA’s efforts. Most funding goes to less than a dozen major projects, even though there’s still 1,322 sites in need of further detox, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Despite the odds, here are seven projects that prove a cleaner future is possible and that the residents of Love Canal didn’t suffer for naught.
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Tag: New Jersey
Behind Prison Walls, This Program Demonstrates That It’s Never Too Late to Learn
While spending a year and a half in a New Jersey prison on drug charges, Walter Fortson enrolled in a class offered by a local community college, knowing that the credits would change the way the world saw him. But he didn’t expect them to affect the way he thought about himself and his future.
“In prison, I realized that there is an incredible value to learning,” Fortson says.
Fortson, a 30-year-old from Philadelphia, dropped out of college prior to his incarceration, but his epiphany resulted in a reversal of his approach to education. While living in a halfway house awaiting parole in 2009, he enrolled at New Jersey’s Rutgers University and graduated with high honors. Later, he received the prestigious Truman Scholarship to study criminology at the University of Cambridge in England.
Fortson believes that educational opportunities for prisoners are key to giving them a chance in a justice system that “does a good job of dehumanizing people,” and so when he returned from overseas, he got busy — expanding upon work that he started as an undergrad, that brought Rutgers students into New Jersey prisons to tutor inmates.
It was tutoring, if not fate, that introduced Fortson to Jim Farrin, 78, a longtime businessman who had recently returned to Princeton, where he was a member of the university’s class of 1958. There, Farrin founded the Petey Greene program, which has students tutor prison inmates (some of whom are working toward their high-school equivalency degrees) three hours each week. Fortson started a chapter at Rutgers, and now serves as a regional field manager for the initiative, working to help bring more inmates closer to the educational transformation that he experienced.
He believes that tutoring the incarcerated has the power to change the attitudes of college students who provide lessons — and that putting a name and a face to the anonymous prisoners housed in our nation’s jails is something that’s essential in order to reform the criminal justice system. “You understand that everyone who goes to prison isn’t some serial rapist murderer that’s trying to kill you or break into your house,” Fortson explains.
Farrin and Fortson are correct about the transformative impact of the program: A 2013 New Jersey Department of Corrections study found that program participants have higher passing rates on high-school equivalency exams, while also demonstrating statistically significant improvements in reading and math.
More than 400 students have volunteered with the organization. Currently, 16 colleges and universities on the East Coast have Petey Greene programs and Princeton’s remains the largest, with around 100 volunteers. But Farrin and Fortson aren’t done; these pioneers aim to have Petey Greene programs in 100 schools by 2017.
The ongoing expansion has been made possible by an army of committed students who, much like Fortson, were changed in unexpected ways by prison tutoring. Those students, Grace Li, Shaina Watrous, and Joe Barrett, all classmates at Princeton who graduated in 2014, got involved with Petey Greene early in their time on campus, and they say the tutoring defined much of their college experience. “Prison reform became the thing that I cared about most,” Li says.
The recent alumni all work full-time as regional field managers (like Fortson) and serve alongside another former Princeton tutor, Sandra Knuth, to facilitate the initiative’s growth. Already, they’re seeing progress — Petey Greene is now active at 11 schools outside of New Jersey. But with each new chapter comes additional challenges.
Dealing with large, bureaucratic institutions is difficult to say the least, and catering to their needs has created tutoring programs that vary from the original model developed at Princeton. To make Petey Greene work in 100 schools, partner agreements for universities were recently created that include mandatory workshops on cultural humility, which help tutors understand their privilege and prevent misunderstandings that might damage the relationship between tutor and student. There is also a strict attendance policy: One unexcused absence and a tutor is out of the program.
The expansion is taking the program into some of the country’s most notorious correctional facilities. It is currently working to bring NYU and Columbia University undergrads to the Rikers Island New York City jail complex to tutor 16- and 17-year-olds. Li, who serves the New York region, says that program participants will likely include some teens recently removed from punitive segregation — the official term of what’s commonly referred to as solitary confinement. (In December, the New York City Department of Corrections ended the use of punitive segregation for adolescents.)
Before the official launch of Petey Greene at NYU, Li worked with a group of students who, as part of a class they took, held a theater workshop for incarcerated boys. When the semester was up, they looked to Petey Greene to stay involved, and in their enthusiasm and transformation, Li sees echoes of her own.
That passion led Li and her equally inspired classmates to not only advance Petey Greene, but to fight the injustices they observed in prisons through other channels, too. They founded the rapidly growing advocacy group Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR) at Princeton, which remains closely linked to Petey Greene. Oftentimes, tutors who want to address bigger issues in criminal justice reform join SPEAR, and when student advocates want to get a hands-on experience with the issue, or feel like they are making a more concrete impact, they sign up to tutor with Petey Greene.
Both Petey Greene and SPEAR understand that education is the key to reform — something that Fortson can personally attest to. “[While incarcerated,] I was looking for redemption,” Fortson says, “and I felt like education was the most viable way to transcend the stigma of having a criminal conviction.”
(Homepage photo: Joe Raedle/Newsmakers/Getty Images)
Why It’s Important to Hear the Haunting Tales of War
Who better to hear tales of wartime bravery from than soldiers themselves?
That was the thinking of 17-year-old Derek Copeland. The Philadelphia native has always been interested in military history — reading books on World War II and visiting battle sites from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, as well as World War II memorials in Europe.
So when it came time for Copeland to choose a project to earn his Eagle Scout rank, military history was at the forefront of his mind. So he found one that related to it and also honored veterans at the same time.
Copeland organized volunteers to interview 17 veterans from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. Recordings of the conversations will be donated to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
“Many my age and in my generation will not have opportunities to directly speak to these veterans and hear their stories first-hand, so I thought recordings would be a wonderful way preserve and hear them,” Copeland tells the Courier-Post. He said the vets’ stories were “moving” and “amazing.”
Copeland’s collected stories include an interview with 91-year-old John Lauriello, who was among the first Marines to land on Iwo Jima, and 64-year-old Richard Feldman, who volunteered for the military during the Vietnam War, informing families when a loved one had died overseas.
Maureen Harris, the spokeswoman of the Library of Congress, says, “We accept oral histories and receive audio and videotaped recordings from public and private donors, including Eagle Scouts, as well as original materials like letters, diaries and photographs.”
Eventually, the recordings will be archived for researchers to study.
MORE: Inspired by Homeless Veterans in His Own Family, This Boy Scout Helps Give Those in His Community a Fresh Start
The Standout Efforts That Are Getting Americans Back to Work
After four years as an assistant branch manager at Hudson Valley Bank in Bridgeport, Conn., Dora Coriano was laid off in August 2013, when the bank left the state.
Coriano, who’s 58, soon discovered that finding a new job wasn’t as easy as it had been the last time she’d been unemployed, 15 years prior. “In 1998, you could literally grab a stack of resumes and pound the pavement,” she says. “You went from door to door … you left your resume, you got called, and you got the job.”
A year after losing her position at the bank, and submitting more than 75 job applications, Coriano still hasn’t found full-time work. Instead, she has joined the ranks of the long-term unemployed.
“It’s been really disheartening,” Coriano says. “That’s how I feel — like I’m stuck.”
Despite a dropping unemployment rate, which hit 5.8 percent in October, 9 million people nationwide are like Coriano — stuck without a job.
Across the country, people are working to determine the best way to help those jobseekers find employment. Economists, analysts, policy-makers and not-for-profits are all seeking the antidote to unemployment, so they’re trying out different programs that train or retrain the jobless, help them achieve certifications or land internships.
Several approaches are showing promise. From paid apprenticeships to beefed-up community college programs and public-private partnerships, here’s a look at some of the ways people are getting back to work — including Coriano.
Placing Workers in Apprenticeships
Organizations looking to bridge the gap between job training and job placement are increasingly turning to the apprenticeship model. One of the most successful of these is Apprenticeship Carolina, an initiative of the South Carolina technical college system.
While Apprenticeship Carolina’s main focus is to help businesses that want to expand, says Brad Neese, program director, “a really positive byproduct is that these companies are going to hire South Carolinians.”
Funded by the state, Neese and his crew of consultants help companies to establish apprenticeship programs by connecting them with technical colleges around the state. “We meet with them and discuss the needs of the company,” says Neese. “We personalize the process, and it’s all free.”
So far, it’s working. Apprenticeship Carolina started with 90 companies in 2007. Today, it’s working with more than 700 businesses and over the past seven years has placed almost 11,000 apprentices (in fields ranging from manufacturing to health care).
Seeking Out Trained Talent
While training programs are reaching out to potential employers, some successful programs start the other way around.
In St. Louis, the aircraft company Boeing approached the local community college to set up a 10-week program for would-be assembly mechanics. The class is free for students (paid for by Boeing), and the company hires 87 percent of those who complete it, says Becky Epps, program director.
In Newark, N.J., the Ford Motor Co. sponsored an automotive technical program at the New Community Workforce Development Center. In nine months, students are trained and certified and then placed in jobs through established relationships with Ford, Nissan and Toyota, says the program’s director, Rodney Brutton.
“The placement rate is 60 percent, which is great in this line of work,” he says.
The Ford program helped a mechanic named Tom after he was laid off. Although he had 20 years’ experience, he found he couldn’t get another job without new certifications. All he heard was, “Leave your number and we’ll give you a call.” No one called.
After completing the program, Tom ended up getting 10 certifications, updated his resume and “started hearing from the dealerships,” he says.
Now, he says, he’s making over $25 per hour, and he’s no longer one of the country’s 9 million unemployed workers.
Linking Companies and Community Colleges
Community colleges can play a key role in workforce development. Recognizing that fact, the White House in September announced $450 million in grants to the schools, aimed at improving job training programs.
One popular movement in job training programs, according to Lauren Eyster, a researcher at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, is to build strong connections with hiring companies, so that trainees can be channeled right into waiting jobs that need their new skills.
Both of these trends are converging at Cape Cod Community College, in West Barnstable, Mass., which won one of the recent federal grants. The school is creating two 12-month programs to train workers to inspect and repair airplanes and airplane engines, in response to the needs of area employers.
“There’s enormous support for this,” says Michael Gross, director of communication. He says the school has letters of support from JetBlue, Delta and Cape Air, which will be looking to hire the first graduates of the program.
Supporting Struggling Students
While community colleges can set people up for new careers, some students have significant obstacles to overcome first, like lack of transportation, child care or money for books.
“The other piece of this is, once you get them into these programs, how do you get them to complete?” says Eyster. “The latest number I saw was only 40 percent of community college students graduate in six years.”
Eyster says some colleges are starting to employ “navigators” to help guide students through school. At the Accelerating Opportunity: Kansas (AO-K) program at Washburn Tech, in Topeka, Kan., students learn technical skills while earning GEDs, with assistance from a navigator provided along the way.
“These students are under-resourced in every way you can imagine,” says Gillian Gabelman, associate dean at Washburn Tech. The navigator helps connect students to social services like child care and veterans benefits.
“The transformation of the students is extraordinary,” Gabelman says. For example, a woman who dropped out of high school to have a baby has been able to go into medicine, and a reformed drug addict went through technical training and is working for a local manufacturer, she says.
Reversing the Snowball of Unemployment
Now Coriano, the unemployed bank worker, may be on a new path to employment, too.
After a year without work, her savings dwindling, Coriano enrolled in a program in Bridgeport called Platform to Employment, aimed specifically at the long-term unemployed, who often face snowballing challenges.
The longer people are out of work, the less attractive they can be to employers and the more discouraged they get. Platform to Employment tries to address both of those challenges with a two-pronged approach.
The first is a full-time five-week course of job preparation classes. “It’s not a job training program,” says Tom Long, vice president of communications and development. “It’s more about taking someone who’s ready to be back at work and helping them improve their confidence and readiness.”
During the course, Coriano and other participants learn how to present their best selves to employers, to develop their “personal brand” and to “conquer their fear about their own limitations,” Long says. They also meet with a behavioral health specialist and learn how to deal with the stress and psychological struggles that come from long-term unemployment.
The second part of the Platform to Employment approach is to place participants in jobs with local employers for a two-month “tryout,” paid for by the program. The try-before-you-buy system allows employers to take a chance on a new employee with no financial risk, since private foundation funding pays for wages.
After a successful pilot program in Bridgeport in 2011, Platform to Employment recently completed a 10-city nationwide expansion. And, with $3.5 million in funding from the Connecticut Legislature, the program is spreading across that state.
When Low-Income People Can’t Afford Solar Energy, This Organization Helps Out
What nonprofit asks low-income people to don hard hats and safety harnesses and scramble up on roofs?
GRID Alternatives does.
The organization not only provides solar energy to low-income neighborhoods, it also teaches residents how to install the panels themselves — helping them gain experience for potential jobs in the solar industry.
Low-income people are more likely to live in polluted neighborhoods, and they definitely can use the break on energy bills that solar panels provide — but most can’t afford to have them installed. That’s where GRID Alternatives steps in. According to the nonprofit’s website, its solar installation efforts have prevented “the release of 340,000 tons of greenhouse gasses over the systems’ lifetimes and provid[ed] more than $110 million in energy cost savings.”
One hundred and fifty volunteers turned up recently to help install solar panels on 10 Habitat for Humanity homes in a low-income Washington D.C. neighborhood, according to Katherine Ling of E&E. The installation celebrated the grand opening of the Oakland-based nonprofit’s D.C. office, which joins branches in California, Colorado, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey.
The D.C. installation event also gave 10 “solar trainees” from a local organization for at-risk youth the chance to gain some valuable job skills and learn about an industry that might eventually provide them with a career.
GRID Alternatives has been able to expand its mission recently due to a $2 million grant from Wells Fargo, as well as equipment donations from Enphase Energy Inc., Sun Edison LLC and SunPower Corp.
The group also sponsors SolarCorps Fellowships, a one-year volunteer training period that qualifies participants for employment in the solar industry. The nonprofit is especially interested in providing jobs to low-income people, minorities and women. To that end, it hosts “women builds” as a part of its National Women in Solar initiative.
Ling visited a woman-only solar installation project in Los Angeles, where SolarCorps construction fellow Ilana Feingold declared, “We love power tools!”
We’re sure they love the energy savings and the jobs that come along with it, too.
MORE: For Those Most In Need of Low Utility Bills, There’s Solar Energy
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What Happens When You Give a Soldier a Pen Instead of a Gun?
For seven years, members of a Philadelphia-based nonprofit have been traveling the country turning the stereotype of veterans not speaking about their military service on its head.
Warrior Writers hosts regular workshops for veterans in Chicago; Ithaca, N.Y.; New York City and Boston; as well as visiting workshops in other cities to help soldiers (regardless of age) express their feelings and experiences through poetry and prose.
This year Warrior Writers is teaming up with Combat Paper, a nonprofit teaching vets how to turn their old uniforms into artful paper (read our story about the organization here), to offer three writing and paper-making workshops in New Jersey. These efforts were made possible by a $135,000 grant from Impact 100 Garden State.
After the veterans and active-duty service personnel polish their writing at the workshop in Morristown, N.J., they will be presenting their work during the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at the NJ Performing Arts Center in Newark on October 25.
One participant in the Morristown workshop is Sarah Mess of Branchburg, N.J. Mess served in the Army in Somalia and wrote a piece in the voice of male soldiers who didn’t think she belonged. “She thinks too highly of herself,” Mess reads in a video for Daily Record. “Let’s knock this girl back down to her stupid, dumb girl position. Come on, boys, sic her. Get her. Beat her. Kick her. Don’t let her up. But she’s bleeding. Good for her. That’s what she gets. She should have never joined the Army.”
“I’m able to express and tap into things here that maybe I didn’t even know were still stirring, like I did today,” Mess tells Lorraine Ash of Daily Record. “I’m able to bring those things to the surface and share them in safe spaces with people who’ve experienced similar things. The draw is that it’s veterans working with veterans. The draw is that we don’t call it therapy. When you start calling things therapy, it creates an aversion to wanting to participate because of the stigma. This works because it’s just community.”
Eli Wright, who works for Combat Paper NJ and served as a medic in the Army, tells Ash that while explorations of painful topics like Mess’s piece are welcome, “We’re not all here because we are broken by the military and trying to heal. We have a lot of veterans involved in these projects who are not combat veterans. A lot served during peacetime, but they’re still artists and they still have plenty of things to say. It’s not all about war trauma.”
Clearly, it’s about art.
MORE: This Paper Can Heal Veterans
How the Garden State Plans to Grow Energy Infrastructure
Following the costly devastation of Superstorm Sandy, the eastern seaboard has spent the last two years picking up the pieces and developing new strategies for disaster preparedness.
The damage serves as a reminder of what natural disaster can do, and the United Nations’s warning that climate change could cost trillions is forcing some states to rethink their plan for infrastructure and energy.
New Jersey joins Connecticut and New York in creating a green bank “to fund projects that will help prevent a reoccurrence of the energy disruptions and build energy resilience.” Both Connecticut (which became the first state to create such a bank in 2011) and New York fund microgrid projects, but New Jersey’s green bank will focus strictly on energy resilience for infrastructure — including water and wastewater plants, hospitals, transit systems and schools, according to Governing.
In New York and New Jersey, 75 percent of power generation is located in flood plains, which have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year, according to United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). An energy resilience bank will support new efforts to create eco-friendly, clean sources of energy that will prove to be more reliable over time. The bank plans to dole out loans and grants to fund projects such as smart grid technology, microgrids and distributed generation, which produce electricity through a variety of smaller energy sources such as solar panels.
The state plans to use $200 million from its Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery allocation from HUD, according to Greg Reinart, director of communications for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. To sustain the bank, the state hopes to attract private-sector financing to invest in new energy technologies and renewable energy.
MORE: Here’s What Happens When Communities Demand Green Energy
3 Reasons Why Sunday’s Historic Climate March Could Be the Start of Something Huge
Thousands of protestors will cram the streets of New York City this Sunday, calling on world leaders to help stop climate change. But they’ll also have another message: “Welcome to a new chapter in the fight against global warming. This time it’s going to work.”
The People’s Climate March is expected to be the biggest-ever collective action against global climate change, and organizers are hoping the protest will mark a watershed moment in their fight.
For years, scientist and activists have been pleading for coordinated action to halt the warming of the planet, but world leaders have repeatedly failed to rise to the challenge. Since the disastrous United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, global summits have not forged worldwide consensus on how to achieve the U.N.’s stated goal of restricting any future global temperature increase to no more than two degrees Celsius.
This weekend’s march is set to coincide with another one of these global meetings: The U.N. Climate Summit 2014. No decisions will be made at the event, which will be attended by 125 world leaders, including President Obama. But the summit will lay the groundwork for landmark U.N. climate conferences this December in Lima and next year in Paris.
Despite the failures of the past, organizers of the People’s Climate March see at least three reasons to hope this year.
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Inspired by Homeless Veterans in His Own Family, This Boy Scout Helps Give Those in His Community a Fresh Start
The challenge facing 17-year-old Boy Scout Robert Decker: Finding a service project that benefitted his Egg Harbor Township, N.J. community.
To earn the Eagle Rank that he’s been working for years to attain, Decker decided that he wanted to make a difference in the lives of veterans struggling with homelessness.
He Tells Devin Loring of the Press of Atlantic City that he was inspired in this mission because his grandfather and several great uncles served in World War II, and some of his uncles experienced homelessness after they returned from war.
Decker contacted Jaime Kazmarck, a social worker at the Department of Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Northfield, N.J., to inquire about how he could help homeless soldiers. Kazmarck is a coordinator with HUD-VASH (Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing), a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the VA to help homeless veterans transition off the streets. The program provides vouchers for rent payments to veterans and supports them with case management and counseling.
Kazmarck told Decker that many of the vets who finally get a key to their own apartment have few possessions to make it feel like home.
So Decker organized a campaign encouraging people to donate practical items to outfit these vets’ apartments, including towels, toothpaste and cleaning supplies.
Decker and other members of his Boy Scout troop stood outside the Somers Point supermarket ShopRite, distributing fliers about the project and talking to people about it. Over two nights, they collected more than $1,500 worth of supplies and donations. According to Loring, Decker collected enough to fill 20 laundry baskets and 10 boxes and was able to purchase 25 $10 Wal-Mart gift cards with money donated for the vets.
“We’re really grateful for Mr. Decker and the troop for getting this together,” Kazmarck tells Loring. “They did a great job. It gives them [veterans] a wonderful start in a new apartment or home.”
Decker has submitted documentation of all his work to the Eagle Scout board of review, who will soon tell him whether he has qualified. We think it’s a safe bet that this generous and hard-working scout will be rewarded with a new rank.
MORE: Veterans Receive Donations from An Unlikely Source: A Twelve-Year-Old Girl
What Exactly Are JPods and How Can They Improve Commuting?
A New Jersey town is looking to the future to help solve a congestion problem, and they’ve found a solution of which George Jetson would approve.
Seacaucus, N.J., located just outside New York City, is home to one of the busiest train stations in the Garden State. A portion of the New Jersey Turnpike also runs right through town — making it the perfect locale to test out a new hybrid of mass transit called JPods. Billed as a combination of light rail and self-driving cars, JPods hover above roads, akin to a ski lift zipping overhead.
Founded by former West Point Academy graduate and U.S. Army officer Bill James, the private transit system was designed to move small groups of people rather than large masses that descend on public trasportation— such as buses or subways — each day.
“Combining solar and relatively small mass transit modules to get from point A to point B fits in especially well with some of the needs we have here,” Secaucus town administrator David Drumeler tells Fast Company. “With our commercial district relatively close but far enough that you couldn’t walk there, an almost on-demand type of mass transit system is an ideal fit for us.”
Each JPod operates as a personal train and is controlled by an interior touch screen. They travel to more stations and switch points than a commuter train or subway system, personalizing mass transit and helping residents get much closer to their destination.
The idea was not to create futuristic transit akin to the Los Angeles landscape depicted in Spike Jonze’s “Her”, but rather, to create sustainable transportation. The entire system is powered by solar panels positioned above the rails. The goal, according to James, is to make sure the entire system is sustainable regardless of how much it may expand in size. James, who served as a logistics officer in the U.S. Army, wanted to design a system that was self-sustainable and less dependent on foreign oil.
“We’re a bunch of West Point grads that looked at this situation and realized we’ve been fighting oil wars since 1990,” says James. “So we decided to do something about it. Our point of view on this thing as veterans is that we need to be looking ahead at what causes the path to war and act in advance of it.”
James enlisted other West Point alumni to work on JPods, with experts ranging in subject such as energy distribution, power plant design and law.
Each JPod can communicate with one another through an intelligent transport system, meaning that the network doesn’t waste energy with empty pods (like subway cars do) and instead uses an on-demand strategy.
Secaucus will test the “Rescue-Rail” version of JPods before building a more permanent model, according to James. The temporary system will be quick and deployable for large-scale events that generate traffic and congestion such as sporting events or conferences.
But will the concept will crop up elsewhere? As a private transit system, that question remains unanswered. While James hopes to bring the JPod to other urban areas, competition with government-funded public transit may prove to be a bureaucratic challenge.
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MORE: New York City Looks to Stockholm for a Traffic Blueprint