Ordinary Hero: Van Jones

Image copyright L. Kathryn Grace, 2009
All rights reserved

Seven months ago, when I first wrote about him, Van Jones was promoting green jobs and a green economy for the blue collar worker.

We need a green economy that honors the earth ... but not a green economy only for the eco-chic. ... The people who are struggling for bus fare--they have a place too.

Van Jones, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

That alone is enough to warrant the Ordinary Heroes award. There's so much more. If it's green, if it's the economy, if it's jobs, Jones is there, showing us how we can lift ourselves and help others lift themselves from poverty to prosperity, slow human-caused climate change and protect our environment in the bargain. In fact, he's shown up twice more here, on Realizing Ordinary, in I'm ready for the green economy--Are you? and in Pinning our hopes on youth.

Hear what he has to say.

We are just now at the beginning of this green wave of new technologies that are environmentally friendly, and that green wave now has to be designed to lift all boats.

Van Jones

A 1993 Yale graduate, "serially successful social entrepreneur", and author of the New York Times best seller The Green Collar Economy:to cite just a few of his accomplishments, Jones is now President Obama's green-jobs czar at the White House, a decision that marks the level of the president's commitment to building a greener economy.

That's exciting. Even more exciting, though, is the hand Jones gives to the most impoverished of our nation and how hard he is working especially to help youth of color to a piece of the American dream.

We can't just keep sending our children away to funeral homes and prisons.

A Tennessee native with keen entrepreneurial savvy, Jones could have done anything with his life. He chose to devote his incredible talent, energy, charisma and intelligence to stopping violence and near-rite-of-passage imprisonment for our nation's youth of color. Three years out of college, he co-founded, with Diana Frappier, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in 1996. In direct disproportion to society, our overcrowded prisons are stuffed with blacks and Latinos. That fact alone makes crime and the prosecution of crime in this country a matter of human rights. Jones sought to change those statistics by changing the lives of the people behind them.

He is perhaps the first to articulate on the national level that more than schooling and jobs are required to change a community from one filled with drive-by shootings, funerals and revolving prison doors to one filled with picket fences, school books and cookies in the oven. Because the poorest of us grow up in the most marginalized communities, often built over landfills and toxic waste dumps, children develop asthma and other chemically-induced diseases in greater proportion than children of affluent neighborhoods. It's not enough to give people a hand up; we need to help clean up.

Jones is committed to cleaning up the toxic mess we made in the last two centuries, and preventing its occurrence in the future--a matter of life and death for poor children.

The next big play in the economy is going to be greening the economy, turning away from the suicide economy to a sustainable economy. Let's make sure those communities that were locked out of the last century's pollution-based economy are gonna be locked in to this new clean and green economy.

For his commitment to ending poverty and endemic racism through the development of environmentally safe industry and for using his passion, energy, intelligence and love to help the poorest of us build prosperous lives while reclaiming the fresh, wholesome beauty of our Earth and preserving our soil, water, air and natural world for generations to come, this week's Ordinary Heroes award is offered to Van Jones with deepest gratitude.

Pinning our hopes on youth

They're plugged in, tuned in and turned on to making change. In Washington, D.C., last Tuesday, two thousand mostly young people from all over the country rallied and marched in a Capitol Climate Action to shut down the toxin-spreading coal plant that lights and heats Congress. They're off and running in the next weeks and months to coal-fired electrical facilities all across the country, and they're Twittering about their experiences during the events so the rest of us can follow them live. Their rallying cry: This is what democracy looks like!



That's not all.

On Thursday, Minnesota youth took their concern for clean air, clean cars and clean jobs to their state capitol, where they heard Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy:

We don't need your leadership in the future. If we had waited for your leadership these past two years, we wouldn't have the presidential campaign we just had. We wouldn't have green jobs as a main slogan, now, reorganizing the whole economy. We wouldn't have the level of hope that we've got. We don't need your leadership in the future. We need your leadership right now.

Take a look at what the kids had to say for themselves, and how they responded to Jones.



Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy,and NASA scientist Dr. Tom Hansen are two names we recognize because they've been warning us of the perils of global warming for decades. Thousands of others, most without any recognition whatsoever, have worked for an equal time to change laws and improve environmental conditions in their communities, states and globally. Every one of these individuals contribute to the vision of the world of Ordinary, and I give gratitude for them, for their selflessness and for their actions, great and small.

Backed by years of research, debate, political action and civil action, our youth have the collective power to compel at last the change that offers hope for one day realizing Ordinary. May they use it well and wisely.

Growing home with green jobs

For sixteen years, Chicago's Growing Home has been teaching homeless people to grow their own pesticide-free food. People living on the fringe grow new lives for themselves while working with the soil. They gain self-confidence and hope while they nurture tender seedlings into mature, fruit-bearing plants. Their health improves when they eat the wholesome foods they've grown, and they gain life and job skills when they sell their premium organic produce to high-end restaurants and at Chicago's premier farmer's market.

Recently, the program set up a local farmer's market on Chicago's south side, making delicious locally-grown produce available to people, many of whom are themselves one minimum-wage paycheck from homelessness, who live in the food desert.

We need a green economy that honors the earth ... but not a green economy only for the eco-chic. ... The people who are struggling for bus fare--they have a place too.

Van Jones, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Growing Home is part of the Green Jobs Revolution. Learn more about it from the people whose lives are changing because of it:

The good stuff that you put into the earth, you get right back out the earth in a better way.

Participant, Growing Home, Inc.

How perfectly Ordinary is that? What are you growing in your garden today?