September 13 Summer Salon: More than Extracurricular

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Víctor: Well, alright, we’re going to go ahead and get started. I just want to thank everyone for being here, and also, we’ve got some folks that are on virtually via Zoom as well. And a big shout out to Estolano Advisors for hosting us here at their offices. This is our second installment of our salon series, which is meant to reintroduce the organization and myself. My name is Víctor Sánchez, I’m the new executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. I started back in February, but actually yesterday was my seventh anniversary at LAANE. It’s an exciting time to be here and to uplift the work that we’re a part of, and building partnerships is a part of that model that we’re going to be talking about today. 

When I talk about our work, oftentimes I reference LAANE as a bridge, a critical bridge that brings together labor and community and other oftentimes unlikely allies to put together innovative solutions that create impact at scale for working families. Today’s story is really no different. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for the folks that are here on this panel to address the climate crisis, using jobs and the infrastructure money that’s coming via the federal government as an opportunity.

We have an amazing panel of our partners who will share parts of that story, starting with Lauren Ahkiam, who is the co-director of our climate campaign at LAANE. Over here, we have Julie Van Winkle, who is the Vice President of UTLA as well as AFT, which is amazing. And then Dr. Porsha Cropper, Senior Program Officer at the Broad Foundation, who oversees the Pathway to Good Jobs program and is a tremendous partner in supporting our work and catalyzing these types of partnerships. And then we have Dr. Rocio Rivas, who’s been a champion on the LAUSD school board, is chair of the Climate Resilience Committee, and is a leader within local government here at the school district level. And then last but certainly not least is Ben Garcia, the Executive Director of the Apprenticeship Readiness Fund. They manage the Building and Construction Trades Council’s job training program to make sure that we’re getting folks into good family-sustaining union jobs. I’m very starstruck by this panel.

We have a very profound challenge with the climate crisis, and so when we’re thinking about how to approach this issue, there’s a lot of effort around decarbonization, obviously new buildings need to be decarbonized because of the policy that has been passed, but existing building stock also needs to be decarbonized. We’re looking at what our effect could be with public institutions, LAUSD in particular. The climate crisis is real. You can’t leave any shortage of solutions on the table. Immediately, creatively, federally, at the state level, and locally, we need to bring partners together to create that scale on an expedited time frame. That’s really what you’re going to hear about today. 

I’ll go ahead and jump in, and I’ve got some questions folks will go through. We’ll have some time, too, hopefully, for discussion. Lauren, I wanted to start with you. You’ve worked on several climate initiatives at LAANE, including the water campaign as well as the waste and recycling campaign. So: why LAUSD, and why now?

Lauren:  Thanks Víctor, and thank you to all my fellow panelists. Just as Victor said, we have a climate crisis, and we cannot, as a region, get to our goals for a healthy and safe future for all Angelenos if we don’t take on greening LAUSD. We can’t do it without LAUSD because they’re the biggest landowner in the County and they’re the biggest utility user. Also, if we win this, we will be doing it in a way that invests in our schools, which are in every community throughout the region, and we’ll be doing it in a way that means we can touch the lives of so many people with those investments, particularly communities of color and working class communities. When we invest in schools, it brings visibility in those communities that change is possible, that our public institutions and our government can be effective, and that our neighborhoods can be greener, shadier, have cleaner air, and be less likely to flood. And we can do it in a way that brings incredible careers to communities to build out these projects. 

We have to engage with our public institutions like LAUSD in a way that makes sure our green jobs are union jobs. We don’t want people to be faced with a false choice between choosing a career that has dignity and provides for families and their future, and choosing to be part of building out climate resilient infrastructure for the District. If we imagine what it looks like to do it with those good union jobs, then we not only see the change on our campuses, but we feel that change in our communities, and it reverberates throughout our neighborhoods to small businesses, bringing the economic resilience that we need for climate resilience. And if we don’t, if we only improve some schools or we only do it with crappy jobs, then there might be some improvements on some campuses, but those disproportionate impacts on communities of color won’t change, and power won’t change. We will be just perpetuating the same problems. There’s just a book out this week, actually, about how we cannot get to climate justice if we don’t take out inequality. This is our chance to also do that. 

Víctor: Speaking about scale, the scale factor is really important. Schools are all throughout the community. They’re well-positioned centers of gravity in these fights. So Lauren, to give you a follow up question: LAUSD is massive. What does winning look like, and what will it take to win?

Lauren:  We know what it means to take on climate change in terms of clean energy, clean transportation, local water, shading, habitat, but are we doing all of it together equitably? We’re not. When we think about LAUSD – and Dr. Rivas knows this because she’s been to every school in her district – there are campuses where there’s a lot of shade, new technology, gardens, everything. And then there are schools where it’s just asphalt and not a tree in sight. It mirrors our communities in terms of some having access to what they need versus being disinvested communities. 

There aren’t a lot of people who are against clean energy or against trees, but there’s a huge gap in the amount of resources we have and the collective will to take on the scale of what is needed. To your point about scale, when you think about LAUSD, it’s 20,000 buildings, over 1,000 schools, 3,000 vehicles in their fleet, almost half those schools would need major upgrades to have enough green space. That’s like 280 acres of pavement. There’s a thousand more clean school buses that we need. There’s so much work to get done that we can sometimes feel paralyzed, and not everyone wants to pay their fair share into doing that work.

But when you think about what winning can look like, it can absolutely impact everyone. If you imagine every campus having solar panels, that’s enough clean energy to rival a power plant. If you think about every kid feeling confident, when they fill up their water bottle, that the water they’re drinking is clean and safe and they don’t have to spend money on bottled water, or if you think about every school staying cool in the heat because there’s enough trees on campus, because they installed energy efficiency upgrades and a new heat pump system with the newest HVAC, then communities that have been continuously extracted from, who suffer the most during heat waves and flooding, would now see that their school is serving as the heart of their community and their neighborhood, providing a connection to nature, capturing water, providing shade. It’s just a really palpable way to see what’s possible and what we can do together, and, like Dr. Rivas has said, to have each child see that we care about them and that we’re investing in their future, that they too can live in resilient communities. We are working right now, together in our coalition and with everyone on this panel, to change the actual lived experience for kids, for educators and the other folks working in the schools, for workers building out the projects, and for the people who are looking for good union jobs who want those transformative careers to take care of their families. We can take this on, but we can only do it if we work together with all of y’all to build a diverse enough coalition where all voices are part of the process, where community members, government workers, leaders, and advocates are all on the same page, and we’re not getting picked apart. Then it’s a huge opportunity. 

Part of what we’re digging into more today is the way we’re all coming together with some unexpected partners, like foundation funders, who can play a role in helping access the resources that we need to do all of this work. Porsha from the Broad Foundation can speak to how foundations can help when you have a huge entity like LAUSD whose primary job is intended to be focused on education, but then there’s a lot of other things that we need to do in terms of the built environment and resources. It’s been incredible to see how groups like the California Community Foundation have been able to bring in extra grant writers like Mission Quest to help access federal funding, because we need as many resources as we can get. It’s estimated we’ll need $80 billion to upgrade everything at LAUSD, and so to be able to pull that down from the federal dollars, make sure we’re getting everything we can out of BIL and IRA, it’s an exciting and creative way that philanthropy has been able to help support this power-building we’ve been doing as advocates and worker leaders.

Víctor: There’s an opportunity to reimagine the role of schools as leaders on this front. And it is a great puzzle in terms of partnerships to help move the ball forward. One of the key pieces of that puzzle is having strong co-governance relationships with elected officials who are leaders at the school board level. Dr. Rivas has played this part in terms of chairing of the committee that she is on, along with Jackie Goldberg, which helped lead climate efforts on the Board itself, including supporting a resolution to reach 100% clean energy by 2030 and the decarbonization of all buildings and vehicle fleets by 2040, and another resolution for all schools to have 30% green space on campuses by 2035. 

As a product of LAUSD schools, I can tell you, black asphalt summers are just not the business. I remember the playgrounds were just all metal bars, so you’d often just sear your hands. Those are things that are just not thought about enough. From our perspective, it’s reimagining what kinds of solutions could be created to help meet the climate crisis, but also make sure our kids aren’t frying their hands or other body parts on the asphalt. Dr. Rivas, what do you think are the greatest hurdles that the District needs to cross to be able to reach some of these ambitious climate goals?

Dr. Rivas: Good afternoon everyone, I’m excited to be here with all of you and everyone on this panel. As mentioned, I chair the Greening Schools and Climate Literacy Committee, the first committee ever of this kind at the District. Lauren is a committee member too. There are several hurdles that we have to be able to overcome. The biggest one that we all have been experiencing – and Makayla here, who’s one of our students, also can attest to – is just the bureaucracy of such a huge public institution. The District has been set in its ways of doing things for a long time. There are many divisions and departments. We have facilities, we have operations. It’s challenging to change the culture of the District, that bureaucracy, even just getting the District to agree that yes, we can do this. Bringing everyone together and also working with our partners and organizations that have been doing this work for a while, finding new ways of working together – I would say that it’s been the biggest hurdle. 

Another hurdle is the funding gap. It’s going to take a huge investment to get the District to address its infrastructure – the buildings, decarbonizing, electrifying our fleet. All of that is going to take over $80 billion. That’s a huge amount. The second largest District in the country, the biggest here in California, is going to take a huge investment. So where do we find those funds? Who do we collaborate with? How do we secure the investments to retrofit our older buildings, modernize infrastructure, upgrade systems? Last year and this year, I’ve celebrated a lot of our schools that are now over 100 years old. Imagine updating all that infrastructure in and of itself, and especially now with the heat we all experienced last week. Our HVAC systems are falling apart. On 100-plus degree days, our kids are suffering and I feel for them. 

Equity and access are also hurdles, making sure that this cleaner future that we all want for our city, our students, and our families is achieved by addressing the real needs of our low income communities, our black and brown communities, our indigenous families as well. They have been experiencing environmental injustice for far too long. As a student myself in LAUSD, I remember those monkey bars were just metal, and I remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe, even as a kid. That was back in the day, but now, even personally, it’s exponential. My son, when he comes home, is sweaty and flustered. He’s like, “Oh my God, it was so hot today.” So I can just imagine all of our kids in the Valley, in East LA, and here, now, downtown. Our district is 70% Hispanic, and there also are a lot of Black and brown communities that are very low income. They are really feeling this, and so we have to make sure we’re not leaving them behind. So, how can we put them first and in the forefront of this transformation that we want for our schools? 

Another hurdle is the workforce. We need to have a workforce that’s ready to meet this challenge, making sure that they’re trained in all of these new jobs that are coming up. It’s one thing, meeting the change, but the demand is in the labor force. My goal, and one of the challenges, is to also bring our high school students into these jobs, so that we are including our students in this big transformation of their own District, of their own schools. We have to make sure that we’re investing in the training of our staff and our educators, and partnering with our trade unions and local organizations to bring forth that skilled labor, which right now is not fully there. 

The goal is to get us ready there, and also to address the scarcity in state funding and the economic uncertainty we’re facing in California, the uncertainty in the budget and in revenue for public institutions. Every year, it’s just getting scarier and scarier, because the cuts, as you all know, first come in education. Our Black and brown communities, our low income communities, are the ones that really feel these budget cuts. We need to be really upfront at the state and federal level in advocating, but not just advocating. I think we have to fight really hard. I was there last year in Sacramento to say, “Okay, I know the cost of adjustment is going to be really low for us, but you can’t do this to our kids, because post-pandemic we’re still trying to get normalized, and if you continue to cut, how are we going to address not only the learning that students need, but also their social development, their mental health, what we need to really be addressing?” The California funding, the budget, is a big challenge. We all have to work on this together. What has been my biggest goal as chair is collaboration. How do we connect with one another so not we’re not working in silos? We all feel this climate change, and we’re all working on it on different levels. But we need to build coherence and alignment in the work that we’re all doing. We need to see that our schools are transforming, but all of these hurdles have to be addressed. And unfortunately, all have to be addressed at once. This is why this panel and this movement are really important to bringing about this work.

Víctor: Thank you, Doctor. The power of partnerships is important in terms of taking this over the finish line, especially hearing about the need for urgency and the role that partnerships can play in creating urgency to help you internally move things forward. The other point that really stuck with me, that I think is also just as important to uplift, is that we’re not just talking about infrastructure improvements. We’re talking about improvements in learning conditions. It impacts a child’s ability to show up in their best way if schools do not have access to infrastructure improvements that are designed to meet the climate crisis. 

You touched on this next question a little bit: the resource piece. There are a couple of school bond measures that are coming down the pike in November. What should we know about them? 

Dr. Rivas: Fortunately, because we know that there is such a big need to address facilities and funding, we have two bond measures – one at the state level, one here in LA –  that are both coming to the ballot in November. We have Prop 2 at the state level, which is designed to provide vital funding for educational facilities all throughout California. Because LAUSD is the biggest district, we will receive some funds, but in order to be able to make upgrades across the district, we have to apply for these funds and it’s going to come with a lot of work. It is going to provide a few billion dollars to address the greening and facilities. Then, the LAUSD Board approved a city bond. It’s called Measure US, or Measure Us, because it’s about all of us. I really like how they named this measure. It’s a $9 billion bond, and it’s going to address everything that I mentioned: money for our aging infrastructure, for electrifying our fleets, for electrical grids and solar panels, for improving energy efficiency and meeting decarbonization goals. We have goals of decarbonizing by 2040, and at least having our schools be 30% green by 2035. It’s $9 billion but, as was mentioned, we need $80 billion. This is just a small amount of money that can help get us where we need to go, but it’s a start. We really do need these two bond measures to be passed for us to get sufficient funds just to get the momentum going, and then we’ll deal with whatever comes after that. 

Víctor: In the spirit of bridge building, philanthropy has really played a critical role in helping to build out the technical capacity that’s needed to meet this moment. I’m really happy to have Dr. Cropper here from the Broad Foundation to add to this conversation. The resources, obviously, are a critical part of how we create job pathways. But to Lauren’s point, could you expand a little bit about why money may not be enough, and what has been the Broad Foundation’s priority with respect to creating pathways and good jobs more broadly?

Dr. Cropper: Thank you, Víctor. This panel is just awesome. I think where I would start is with how you opened it up: this historic moment, this range of infrastructure dollars. More than $2 trillion coming down the pipeline is estimated to create over 12 million jobs over the next decade. 

That scale and scope is historic, but where we come in is: there are so many barriers, and many of my colleagues here have mentioned those barriers when it comes to how we meet this moment. On the workforce side, do we have the skilled workforce that’s career-ready to meet the demand that’s coming already down the pipeline, and then, as Lauren mentioned, some of the challenges we’ve faced is that many of our nonprofits, even public agencies, don’t always have the capacity to even apply for this funding. The need for grant writers, technical assistance to apply on time – because when you look at the EPA websites, these deadlines are coming every other month – you need the additional capacity to do that. And then, as Lauren mentioned, there’s the real need for a convener to help our nonprofits and our agencies navigate this fast funding enterprise. 

As we’ve been thinking about our role in this larger ecosystem, we’ve been thinking about our strategy when it comes to the future of LA. How can we prepare youth, adults, and families to really thrive in an inclusive economy? It centers on investing in proximate leaders, organizations that can help us unlock these public dollars, bring the money to LA, and, as part of that, be intentional around creating good quality jobs in the region and then preparing those career pathways, being intentional around creating or expanding pre-apprenticeships and apprenticeship opportunities. 

How can we really be a convener, a bridge builder to do this work? I think Dr. Rivas mentioned collaboration being a key part of that. We’re thinking about how we can increase awareness and build the capacity of our nonprofits to go after this money, because it is equity centered. The other component is supporting community to foster connections with one another like we’re doing here, and really helping public agencies to partner with nonprofit agencies in the region, because when we look at the scoring for those those federal grants, they want to see that you are partnering with community, and you’re being intentional around what you’re going to do with this funding and bringing it to community. We’ve been centered on those things and expanding work-based learning opportunities from cradle to career, thinking about K through 12 onward, to really be intentional about how we’re connecting our communities to family-sustaining jobs and economic mobility.

Victor:  How do you see LAUSD contributing to that vision?

Dr. Cropper: LAUSD is essential to this work. LAUSD is the second largest employer in the county and they’re a huge contractor of public good – textbooks, software, school buses. All of that matters to students, but it also fuels our local economy. Thinking about LAUSD and also LA Metro, leading up to the Olympics, spending money on infrastructure, the City of LA does a lot in terms of contracts, so how do you ensure they’re creating good jobs in the process? Good jobs are not created in a vacuum: it’s the organizing, the advocacy, the policy changes that have to happen for us to be intentional in how we’re creating those good jobs. When I think about the work that LAANE is doing with your partners, centered around public contracting, project labor agreements, CBAs and local hiring, that’s really helpful in partnering with LAUSD and so many agencies, helping them understand how they can play an active leadership role in building those local economies. That’s the work that we’ve been supporting, because that is how we build pathways to a good job.

Victor: Part of the challenge that’s in front of us, in the spirit of reimagining, is the narrative change that comes with seeing schools as vehicles for making impactful progress on the issue of climate change. And what’s been really instrumental to that narrative change was this door that was opened via the Beyond Recovery platform that UTLA presented. Julie, I was wondering if you can talk about that, the decision to include climate demands in UTLA contract negotiations, and how that played a role in this whole conversation?

Julie: Thanks for that, I’m so honored to be on this panel. It’s such a cool, reflective moment for me because UTLA supported Dr. Rivas’s school board campaign and it’s great now, being here with her on this panel, hearing about how she’s advocating for students. It’s important that we have people who really value public education making those efforts. 

I’m one of the lead negotiators for UTLA, and one of the important things we’ve been doing is engaging the community, not just sticking with the traditional bargaining topics that a lot of teachers unions do, like pay or working conditions. We address that too – it’s very important – but since the mid 2010’s we’ve been trying to get input from the community, and when we had our first drive in a long time, in 2019, the groundwork to win that contract had been built on bargaining for the common good. When we were putting together our 2019 contract fight, we had a separate package of common good demands, and that was really important at the time because it had never been done before and the district didn’t want to bargain with us on it. Something I was really proud of in this last contract is that there wasn’t a separate package of common good demands – we have common good language fully embedded in our contract. We won language on the Black Student Achievement Plan and the Healthy Green Public Schools MOU, which we have been working on with the community to see what issues affect our students and our families, both directly and indirectly. If a student is burning up in a classroom, if a student has time for recess but there’s no shaded areas or plants, that affects their learning, and that was the impetus for us to think about the Healthy Green Public Schools bargaining demands. 

This all happened after we came back from the pandemic shutdown. We hadn’t really fully processed, as a society and as a union, all the changes that had happened with the pandemic. The district was the largest provider of food to our communities during the pandemic. They never used to do that, it wasn’t their job, but schools have been criminally underfunded for four decades, and then suddenly when the pandemic came, there was proof that the federal government and the state government could fund schools the way they should have been funding them the whole time. I think the fight will continue because now, we don’t have that funding anymore. It’s the first year we don’t have that funding, and yet we have the hottest summer on record and guess what? Next summer is going to be the new hottest summer on record. It will keep going, so thinking about all these issues in a vacuum isn’t helpful. They’re all related. 

I’ve been thinking about the next iteration of the Healthy Green Public Schools MOU. We do have some language in there about building career pathways – I think we really need to think about the physical infrastructure, which a lot of the panelists have already mentioned, but also what are the outcomes? We’ve been pushing the path to four-year colleges for the last couple decades and that’s great, we should offer that to every student who wants to do that. But there’s the cost of college and the increasing uncertainty about whether you’re going to graduate from college and not necessarily have a clear high-quality career pathway in front of you. Especially since the pandemic, when kids were at home trying to learn on Zoom, this weird situation that no one was used to, before then coming back to the classroom, now students are like, “Why am I going here every day, why am I learning all these academic subjects for college prep?” Some of them are very helpful. I’m a math teacher, I love math. But most people don’t need to know how to do logarithms on a daily basis. Maybe we should be thinking about having an avenue for students to get trained in the Trades. Green jobs are not a new field, it’s existing fields – electrician, pipe fitter, HVAC, sheet metal worker – but now they’re being updated to be part of the green economy and these jobs are high paying union jobs. So often when I talk to people in these careers – the most successful people in my family are in the Trades – they just kind of stumbled upon it. It wasn’t available to them and accessible in high school. They had to find their path and make that connection. But what if we offered that pathway, where students could get trained in a high quality union job, and then immediately upon graduation start a paid apprenticeship? A lot of our students have a lot of pressure to contribute financially even before they graduate, but especially after they graduate, and unfortunately a lot of the work study programs we offer in the system now are working at the mall, working at fast food restaurants. Those are not pathways that lead to jobs that provide benefits, that are going to be able to sustain a student and their family. So what if instead we shifted and created job pathways working with other unions, with the Building Trades? 

We won our victories in 2023 largely due to the fact that UTLA and SEIU 99 worked together to get a lot of those wins, and I’m excited that we’re now building our relationship with the Building Trades and thinking about how we can work together to in a more meaningful way to create these pathways and that the Building Trades, the experts in that field, know we’re going to prepare students adequately. We have the Olympics coming, our schools are outdated and need a lot of upgrades, there’s so much potential to put students in high quality careers building that future for LA, building affordable housing for the city.

I’m really appreciative of the work that LAANE does because sometimes we at UTLA stay in our own silo of education, and connecting with LAANE has really challenged me to think about more potential partners that can fight for these things that our schools and our communities need, together.

Víctor: That’s the perfect set-up, Julie, for where we’re going. When we’re talking about climate work and trying to meet the needs of the climate crisis, the New Deal framework gets thrown around a lot: we need a Green New Deal. The root of the New Deal, though, was that it was a jobs program, it was a job creation policy. If we borrow that framework in this context, that’s what we’re really trying to inject into this conversation: that we can meet the climate crisis through a jobs program that is having impact at scale, and that’s why Ben this is perfect for the MC3 program and you because the career pathways, not just the physical infrastructure but the people power that is needed to make this happen, is so important. I’m hoping you can tell us a little bit about the MC3 program, how it’s changing the face of the Building and Construction Trades, and the current workforce development classes at LAUSD. 

Ben: Good afternoon everybody, I’m honored to be a part of this panel. The Building Trades nationally in 2014 did some research and found out that there were challenges for community members accessing opportunities within their local unions. Here in Los Angeles, there are about 48 unions in building and construction. Each of those unions has their own process for applying and getting in. Half of our local unions have an interview and application or testing process, the other half don’t. Instead you have to get hired by an employer before you can get into the local union. And so, a lot of times when I was giving community presentations and talking to folks, the feedback I would hear is “I’ve applied and I haven’t heard back. I’ve gone down and talked to folks, but I haven’t heard anything.” And how long have you been trying? “Three years, four years now.” This feedback got back to the national Building Trades, and they decided to create the MC3 program – the Multi-Craft Core Curriculum. 

MC3 is an apprenticeship readiness program designed to provide information on these processes, to share information about what all our local unions do. Most of us know what about four of our Trades do. Everyone knows what carpenters do, electricity, plumbing, and all of us have painted a bedroom or two in our house. But most people don’t know what steamfitters or boilermakers are, what an ironworker or a sheet metal worker does, so they won’t gravitate towards these positions. The Building Trades created this curriculum, and they received input from all our local and international unions. Then, they handed it over to local Building Trades across the country to govern and to work with local community partners. Currently, in Los Angeles there’s about 26 MC3 programs spread out from Palmdale to Santa Ana and the South Bay, and there are Building Trades Councils in other regions doing the same work. Here in Los Angeles, with LAUSD we have five MC3 programs at Adult Occupational Centers, and right now we’re working on creating programs within LAUSD in High School. That is a pilot program that we’re working on. 

To help people further navigate the process, the Building Trades locally in 2017 decided that they would create the organization that I am currently the head of, the Apprenticeship Readiness Program. This organization was designed to help sustain the programs we have running, to help provide local, state, and federal funding to support those programs, and to make the connection between the programs that are doing great work in our communities and the projects that we’re building in Los Angeles. Right now, we work with LAUSD on the Facilities PLA side of the house to take graduates from LAUSD programs and put them directly into LAUSD modernization and construction projects. It’s been fantastic. LAUSD had a program years ago called We Build, MC3 is just taking that to another level. What we’re seeing now is a higher percentage of postgraduates working in other trades – the steamfitters, the boilermakers – and these trades are our highest paying trades in all of our local unions. They require a bit more training, a little bit more education, but between the MC3 program and LAUSD, we’re making sure they’re geared up for this opportunity. It’s been a fantastic partnership, and we’re looking forward to continuing the program.

Victor: We know that LAUSD is the largest employer of the Trades and holds the Trades’ largest Project Labor Agreement. You’ve built a lot of pride in that relationship, because of how it generates high road jobs, especially for LAUSD former students. Why do you think it’s important to build climate upgrades for LAUSD?

Ben: I like putting people to work. That’s really what it’s all about. To what Lauren was saying earlier, we’re really focused on putting folks into high-road, family-sustaining jobs, and when we talk about climate upgrades, we’re talking about HVAC systems, for example. These climate upgrades are completed by high paying jobs. These are jobs that folks with zero experience and just a little preparation from our MC3 programming can do, and most of the folks getting these opportunities will be getting close to six figures in their very first year of employment with very little skill. So I think it’s really important for us to focus on trying to create these opportunities, support these opportunities, because it’s going to put more people to work and help them feed their families and provide for them.

Victor: That’s really an important point to bring us to a close here: what it took to build the middle class, a strong middle class, was a lot of public investment, because we could hold that money accountable to making sure those jobs were family-sustaining jobs. At the end of the day, that’s what this is about: putting people to work while also meeting the moment, and the moment in front of us compells us to take bold actions to address the climate crisis. It takes partnerships like this to be able to do that at scale. We’re really honored to be able to have a campaign that brings all these amazing folks together, and I really am looking forward to continuing to work together to build this massive movement at LAUSD so that we can not only be a model for the country, but be an anchor, because of the sheer scale of LAUSD and what it would mean nationally to make progress on this issue. It’s a very unique opportunity that we have, and we can’t wait to continue the conversation. I want to thank everyone for taking time on their Friday, and to thank the panel again for being a part of this conversation.