By Barbara Grady

Green jobs visionary Van Jones is busier than ever these days.

President Obama recently named the Oakland activist as special advisor for green jobs, enterprise and innovation. And as he prepared Sunday to head to Washington, D.C., to start his new job, Jones reflected on the recent past.

“What happened is our little effort to put disadvantaged kids in green job training opportunities here in the Bay Area” caught the attention of Congress last year, he said. Soon mayors, senators, CEOs and labor leaders were calling, too, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked for Jones’ help in crafting green jobs legislation. And so, the green-collar jobs creation effort that started in Oakland “blew up,” he says, to become a national movement championed by congressional leaders and winning hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulus money. 

As the 40-year-old lawyer, bestselling author and social entrepreneur spoke around the country about the promise of green jobs in solving poverty and pollution alike, the White House called. Administration officials wanted to know if Jones would join Obama in the work of “creating 21st century jobs” in energy efficiency and renewable energy, with an interest in building “opportunities for vulnerable communities.” They wanted his expertise.

Jones, who founded Green for All to promote green-collar jobs as a national anti-poverty strategy, as well as the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and ColorOfChange.org, hesitated a bit, worrying what would happen to his organization and grassroots movement.

However, last week during a goodbye party, which included several hundred colleagues (this reporter/green jobs intern being one of them), supporters, well-wishers and followers, Jones said he accepted the White House position so he could work on the movement from “the inside” while they all continue to work from the outside to implement a strategy that could lift a generation out of poverty and save the planet.

“Most liberation struggles don’t have the opportunity to have a true inside/outside strategy,” Jones said. In most struggles, “we spend most of the time at the margins. Most of the time we have big ideas with very little capacity” to make real and lasting change, he continued.

This time is different. Jones said that with a burgeoning movement on the outside and an Obama administration committed to creating green pathways out of poverty on the inside, things can change.

Jones’ confidence in future changes also extends to the Green for All new president, labor leader Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, whose success in securing children’s health care and living wages for workers in central California means she knows how to implement ideas.

“The struggle we are part of now, to beat a global recession and global warming, to fight poverty and pollution at the same time, has the potential to become a true mass struggle,” he said. “It transcends class and color” in helping everyone, he said, but it will particularly help the poor.

“It bends toward the poor,” he went on to say, in not only bringing them job opportunities but also in reducing asthma and the concentration of pollution in neighborhoods where they live.

It has been Jones’ lifelong mission to work for economic justice. Born in Tennessee, the son of a schoolteacher and a school principal and the grandson of a prominent minister, Jones grew up going to church and thinking about the greater good. An honors student, he went to Yale Law School after college and while there, turned his inclination to do good through civil rights work after he witnessed the discrepancies between the privileged life of students at Yale and the ghetto life of nearby New Haven residents.

Jones moved to Oakland to work on civil rights issues and soon founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which focused on police brutality and a law enforcement system that threw too many kids into jail. Ella Baker had several successes in stopping the expansion of the prison system in California and bringing attention to police abuse. Then, close to burning out over the continual “fight” against the system, Jones took a break and changed his way of thinking.

In his best selling book, The Green Collar Economy, Jones writes about the effectiveness of creating joint goals and win-win solutions in working for economic justice instead of always “fighting” something. He says that social justice movements historically have “demanded” action of someone or some institution and that approach has flaws in not providing a path for action or a solution. Jones also says the urgency of these times when global warming and inner-city poverty threaten to dismantle life as we have known it calls for new, hand-in-hand practical action … it calls for a solution.