 Okay good afternoon everyone. Hello. Thank you for coming. We've got a great crowd. Thank you so much. Welcome to today's briefing on energy efficiency jobs, our green jobs. I'm Ellen Vaughn. I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute here in Washington. We are delighted to be partnering with the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition on this briefing and I want to thank Congressman Bobby Rush so very much for helping us get this room and John Marshall I'll introduce to you in a few minutes. Really really appreciate that. So EESI just quickly as you can see 501c3 not-for-profit we're a nonpartisan organization since 1984 we've been bringing policy to the and facts to the policymaking process on energy and environmental issues. We care very much about addressing climate change and and and having a more sustainable and resilient economy. So we are super happy to partner with the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition because they share so many of them the same values. EFA is a coalition of national state and local environmental consumer and housing organizations. EFA connects climate health and equity by bringing energy efficiency to affordable housing. So the briefing today will address these issues that each of them alone is is a challenging public policy issue. But in fact they're interconnected and so if we if we can look at these as sort of the interconnected challenge that they are that's where we're going to find our policy solutions. So I'm real happy to introduce the panel that we have today an expert panel and what I'll do is I'll introduce them one by one and then we'll take your questions at at the end of the presentation. So please hold on to your questions and and then we'll we'll do that for sure. So yeah first I'd love to introduce John Marshall as I said John is in the office of Congressman Bobby Rush his chairman of the House Energy Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee. John is senior policy advisor and primarily managing Chairman Rush's energy and environment portfolios developing legislation policy and initiatives and establishing relationships with local state and federal agencies and working with industry representatives unions and community groups. So welcome John thank you so much for being here and I'll hand it over to you. Morning everyone again my name is John Marshall as Ellen mentioned I am a senior policy advisor for Chairman Rush of the Energy Subcommittee. Chairman Rush has been the leading Democrat on the Energy Subcommittee since 2011 and during that time workforce development has always been one of its top concerns. We there's two pieces of legislation I want to mention today one is a workforce development bill we've been working on for the past three Congresses. The bill is currently called the Green Collar and Blue Collar Jobs Act and what this bill does it targets minorities, veterans, women, returning citizens and other underrepresented groups to get trained into the energy efficiency and other energy sectors. This is a bill like I said we introduced under previous Congress with Republican control but we weren't able to put any funding in the bill. My boss took over as chairman in January we reintroduced the bill. We added a new clean energy grant program which would train those same underrepresented groups to go into the energy efficiency, grid modernization, renewable energy and other clean energy sectors. The bill now has a $65 million funding level for over the course of five years. It passed again our subcommittee and full committee two weeks ago with bipartisan support and we expect to have it on the floor in the very near future. The second piece of legislation I want to mention is the weatherization bill which is the town called Rush Bill that also came through energy and commerce two weeks ago. This bill reauthorizes the weatherization program. We increased the funding from $290 million for the first year up to $350 million over the subsequent year over a five year period. One of the amendments that my boss introduced to the bill would also target local low income folks for training in the weatherization sector. My boss believes that we need to make sure, first of all, we know that energy efficiency is one of the sectors that has more jobs than any other energy sector and really all of them all combined. But my boss wants to make sure that we are doing this in a way that's equitable and fair to all citizens. We want to make sure that everybody has a chance. And so the bill targets local low income folks who are in the communities where the weatherization funding is going. We want to make sure that we're targeting people who have historically been overlooked in these jobs. We know these are great careers. These are great jobs that the skills and training that you receive are something that can last a lifetime. We want to make sure that everybody is taking the part in these opportunities. So again, the weatherization bill and also the green collar and blue collar jobs act are two pieces of legislation that just passed energy and commerce. They will be coming to the floor very soon. Obviously, we like all of your support and I will take any questions when we get to the Q&A session. Thank you. Thank you, John. And thanks very much to the congressman for all that important work. This is so good to see these things moving forward. And yeah, energy efficiency, some people call it the fifth fuel or another fuel. It's really a huge opportunity to not only address environmental issues, but reduce costs that we have for paying our energy bills. And the jobs aspect is what we'll now talk about with Khalil. Khalil Shahid is with the National Resources Defense Council. And he is leading the Energy Efficiency for All project to focus on utility-funded energy efficiency programs in the affordable multi-family housing sector. So at NRDC, Khalil is working with these affordable housing partners like National Housing Trust to advocate for efficiency investments in things like the EPA Clean Power Plan, neighborhood initiatives, and he's also worked in the expansion of green communities in New Orleans, which I think is where you're from, right, Khalil? So please welcome Khalil Shahid. Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you. I feel like I'm the teacher and I'm holding you all from recess. The last one. So again, my name is Khalil Shahid. I'm a senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council based here in our DC office where I work with the Energy Efficiency for All project, which is a nationwide project but focused now in 13 states across the country, both the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, the South and Midwest, and California is in many ways our western outlier. And the purpose of the Energy Efficiency for All project, it's a partnership between NRDC and the National Housing Trust are the two primary sort of advocate partners, but also Elevate Energy, which is formerly CNT Energy out of Chicago, and the Energy Foundation. And our work for the past five years now has been to increase the share of utility dollars. Well, initially, utility financed energy efficiency programs going to the affordable multifamily housing sector, because unbeknownst to many people, and this is really across all programs across the country, we spend a little over $12 billion annually in energy efficiency programs and services. And less than 5% of that actually goes to the affordable multifamily housing sector, even though multifamily housing as a whole represents about 20% of our total nation's housing stock. And it's also where the majority of our nation's low income people and really the poorest actually live in the multifamily sector. And so there are many barriers reported, some imagined by utilities and other service providers to actually getting resources and funding to low income families in multifamily housing. And so our work has been devoted to removing those barriers and making it easier to service these programs. And here behind me you can just see a breakdown of the 13 states that we're working in. And most of these we're actually working at the state level with utility regulators in the state. But we also work with a lot of the largest metros, sometimes negotiating with utilities directly to create new programs. And there has been some success over the past five years, we've raised close to half a billion dollars in new revenue in new financing for these for these families and for these properties, and providing services to literally hundreds of thousands of people and families. And so this success gave us room to really think, okay, so who is actually going to do this work if there's so much money that we're generating into the sector, who's actually going to do this work. And so we wanted to sort of take a step back and begin to look at the energy efficiency workforce, and how our our efforts to make financing more available to affordable multi family could also be a tool for job creation, job access and economic development for some of these communities. And we and we also wanted to sort of reframe or reimagine what we think of as the green job. Because in in most senses, you know, when we when we say that term, when we imagine that we think of someone on a rooftop installing a solar panel, when the overwhelming majority of green jobs are and are going to be in energy efficiency in housing, redevelopment, reconstruction, retrofitting, weatherization is where the majority of these jobs are going to be. So we need to have deliberate policy that's going to both incentivize these types of jobs, but also make sure that there's training, opportunity and access for people in these communities to be able to access these jobs. And so and particularly for the low income housing sector, this is this is going to be very important. And this isn't a charity to the residential sector or the low income housing sector. The residential sector represents the single largest measure that we can that we can deploy to reduce carbon emissions in this country. Retrofitting all residential housing in this country will give us about the CO2 equivalent of 550 metric tons by the year 2020. That's more than any single thing we can do for transportation, any single thing we can do for industry in any single thing we can do for for for commercial industry. If we retrofit and bring these how homes up to standard, reducing energy bills, improving indoor air quality, you know, protecting people from outdoor air air pollution, we are able to also reduce our carbon emissions by 550 CO2 equivalent metric metric tons by 2050. And so there's actual value to retrofitting these homes. This isn't just a welfare service or program to these families, but it's actually societal economic and climate value that's actually coming back to us for doing this work. And so we set out with BW research, we commissioned research of through BW research firm to do some of the number crunching for us to look at, you know, what the jobs potential of retrofitting just the affordable multifamily housing, and that's both subsidized and unsubsidized housing in our in our 13 EFA states and their largest metro areas. And so we did that first by getting an accounting of the building stock, including the size of the units, number of units, you know, where they were, what what what condition they were in when they were built in terms of the year, within within also surveyed contractors and companies that deliver energy efficiency services to many of these buildings to get an accounting of what types of measures would be deployed, how much labor time is required to implement these measures. So it was a very exhaustive study that that went into it. And unfortunately, we don't have the final numbers yet, but but I will go over some of the preliminary data with you in just a moment. And so but first, what what we found, particularly in talking to local advocates, workforce development providers, our union partners is that really job quality matters most. And when you compare the the the wage scale of retrofitting multifamily housing to single family housing, it's just really not a comparison. One of our colleagues who works in Ohio and administers a lot of the weatherization, the systems program dollars, you know, has remarked about the wage difference between being able to do multifamily versus single family and how in many and how many weatherization contractors are actually having trouble keeping their labor force because once they're trained, they're able to go off and and get work that pays at a higher wage because if you're only doing the single family homes, just those wages are just so much lower. But in a single family, because because the building is so much larger, so much complex or so much more work, as you can see, you know, the wages start off at the entry level installation and and repair services at about $20 an hour. And when you get into the higher levels of architecture and engineering for these buildings, you get you get upwards of 30 to 35 $38 an hour. And that's really across the board. And with an average for retrofitting multifamily housing of about $23 an hour. And so and so we're talking about family sustaining wages, you know, in being able to do this work that's providing real societal benefit, both in economic development, but also in environmental and climate benefits as well. And so let me hold one second. And so what we found was that overall across our across our 13 states, if we retrofitted the total number of affordable multifamily housing in those states, we had the potential of creating over 700,000 full time jobs, right? And so that's just an aggregate number. So I don't want you to I don't want you to go out and say that, you know, the radical environmentalists are saying that you're going to retrofit every multifamily house and every state in one single year. So but think about that if you pan that out over over a number of years, five years, 10 years, and we're only talking about the multifamily housing stock. If you retrofitted the entire residential stock, you're going to be creating even more jobs. But just the slow income unsubsidized and subsidized multifamily housing stock, we're talking about 700,000 jobs across those 12 states, I mean, 13 states that I showed you earlier, 700,000 jobs. And with a high of about 180,000 in California, obviously, because of the population, because of the density of their cities, again, also in New York City, you're talking about about 230,000 jobs, but even in less dense, less popular states such as Michigan, you're talking about about 30, about 35,000 jobs statewide 16 in Detroit, for Chicago, you're looking at around 32,000 jobs just for the city of Chicago alone. Right. And so but then as we got the numbers back, and we were you know, very impressed about what we found, you know, in terms of the number of jobs that could be generated from this sector, we're also concerned about who actually had access to these jobs. And we wanted to make sure that that that that low income families that really need this work the most that those those that have been excluded from this work would have opportunity to actually receive benefit both in terms of the direct savings from having their homes retrofitted, but also in the economic and the job development benefits from actually generating these services. And so what we saw was that there were deliberate need to address the disparities because as many of you can guess, energy efficiency is an overwhelmingly white workforce. You know, it tracks with many of the other disparities that we see in our society and our economy. But it's particularly egregious when we look that multifamily housing, because say if you take a state like Georgia, where 90% of its multifamily housing is in the Atlanta metro area, there is no reason why energy efficiency services and workers in the Georgia or Atlanta metro area should be two times more likely to be white than to be a person of color with a with with with a population as diverse as Atlanta. And so what and so again, preliminary what what our data found was that was that owners of buildings were two to two and a half times more likely to be employed in energy efficiency services. White workers as opposed to workers of color were again two times more likely to be employed, particularly, and it gets higher when you get into the architecture and the and the engineering positions, but there are there are existing disparities, there are barriers to employment training and opportunity. But we also can't discount workforce discrimination because because when you have a contractor pool, when you have a workforce pool that is so overwhelmingly white, you're you're going to see replicable patterns of hiring replicable patterns of where outreach is happening, replicable patterns of where training is happening, where it isn't happening, in terms of who gets entry level opportunities into these programs and services. And so, and so policy and strategies to address the workforce disparities have to be very deliberate, both about the training aspect of it and getting people access to the opportunity to get the skills, but also about the entrepreneurial aspect of it and really opening up the contracting process and making sure that that firms of color who are going to be the more likely to hire workers of color are also getting access to these opportunities. And I'll stop there. And we'll transition to the next speaker. Thank you all. Thanks so much, Khalil. And I should point out that these slides will be in all the presentations and video will be available at the website, EESI.org. So I think that your slides are probably different than what you have in your printout. So be sure to check that out. Thank you so much. I kind of also look at this as we have so much need. Our building sector uses about 40% of our total energy and over, I think, close to 75% of electricity and almost 40% responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. So there's a huge opportunity in the building sector is it's low hanging fruit to use a cliche because so many of these technologies, materials are available, unlike in, say, transportation, we're still working on a lot of things. But there's it's it's just ready to happen. And so we have all of these and new construction is just a tiny piece of the whole building sector really most of what we have are existing buildings. So so we need these people, we need everybody to be able to get trained and have the opportunity to work in this in this in this potential booming sector because that's really it's going to be so valuable in so many ways. So thank you, Khalil. So I am delighted to introduce our next speaker, Phil Miller. Phil is interim co executive and director of operations at Rising Sun Center for Opportunity. This is a nonprofit organization at working at the intersection of economic and climate resilience based out of Oakland, California, although he says he doesn't mind the humidity. Go figure. I don't know. Phil has worked for over 15 years in the nonprofit and public education sectors focusing on equity, people and the financial strategic visions for Rising Sun. So, Phil, thank you so much for being here and good afternoon, everybody. Ellen, I shared that with you in confidence about the humidity. I didn't want to compromise any integrity I had from the get go, but I guess that horses out of the barn. So let's dive in. Like Ellen shared, my name is Phil Miller. I'm the co executive and director of operations with Rising Sun Center for Opportunity. It's really a pleasure to be here with you all this afternoon. I want to take you all on a very quick journey through what we do at Rising Sun, share with you some context about who we are, what our work is. I'll talk very briefly about the communities in which you work and with the people whom we serve. I want to also then share what our experience is, the local perspective, what kind of our boots on the ground day to day work tells us and what I can share with you all. And then finally, I want to wrap up with four recommendations that we have for any work around policies or initiatives that exist in this energy efficiency, workforce development, and climate resilience space. So Rising Sun Center for Opportunity, our mission is up here behind me, and it's highlighted on the next three slides. We work every day to empower individuals to achieve economic, I'm sorry, environmental and economic sustainability for themselves and for their communities. So if you think of sort of a Venn diagram, if you will, where one circle is the environmental, the other circle is the economic, we work in both spaces and a lot of the time in the overlapping section of those two. We were established in 1994, so we just hit 25 years as an organization we can now rent a car, that's the big milestone for us. We have a work in the greater San Francisco Bay area, and then we also serve portions of California's Central Valley. We achieve our work through three programs and initiatives. So we have a climate careers program, which is a youth development and energy efficiency jobs training program where we work with youth from disadvantages circumstances to provide them job training, skills development, and that's all centered around an earn and learn component where they actually are involved in the workforce. They're performing residential energy, at residential energy efficiency retrofits. And for many of them, it's actually their first paid job, so it's their first foray into the world of work. We have an opportunity build program, and that program is an adult pre-apprenticeship job training program, where we work with adults with barriers to employment, send them through a 10 week training program, and they finish that program with a variety of certifications, including the trade recognized MC3 certification, and then they're ready to enter into a variety of apprenticeships in the trades. And then our final initiative and program is policy. So we work at the city, the county, the regional, the state and the federal level to really ensure that workforce and equity are critical aspects of any climate related policy. I'll share very briefly some of our impact year to date. So since inception, we have trained and employed, I would say trained and or employed over 2,500 youth and adults. We have performed over 47,000 energy efficiency retrofits. After this summer, that'll go over 50,000. We've offset over 115,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, and we've achieved for the households in which we go into to perform these energy efficiency retrofits, and most of those households are low to moderate income. We've achieved cumulatively over 22 million dollars in savings for those customers. As I've mentioned before, we're in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, the nine counties that make up the Bay Area. We're also in portions of California's Central Valley, and we are in the homes and we work with a very diverse range of people, and I use diverse in the broadest sense of the word possible. So it's diversity in terms of race, it's diversity in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, education levels, language ability, languages people do or sometimes do not speak. And then the bullet here with political orientation. I know the Bay Area, we have our own brand of politics that we're known for. And yes, that is where we are, where many of us live, but I also want to be really clear that that we hold multiple political lenses, you know, the California Central Valley is not the same as many parts of the Bay Area. And so we understand the nuances to where these topics and issues fall on the political spectrum. I'll dive in and share sort of five highlights from our our lived experience. We see on a day to day basis that the need for energy efficiency job changing is strong. We have people come through our doors all the time and tell us, I want to enter into this industry. This is what I want to do, but I don't have the skills. No one will hire me. Can you please help me get trained? We also experience the flip side of that where we have contractors who have relationships with, who are telling us all the time, they cannot, they can't fill positions. They need semi-skilled, skilled and highly skilled people to enter into, into their industry. And there's, there's a desperate shortage of labor in that area. We also experience that, and this is a theme that Khalil mentioned that I'm going to return to several times in my time with you all, is that not all energy efficiency jobs are quality jobs. And, you know, we, on a very organizationally personal level, our opportunity build program used to be explicitly and only focused on helping people get into the energy efficiency industry. And several years back we, we actually had to make a pivot and sort of adjust course because what we found was that the people we were training and the people that we were serving were getting into these pathways that were not quality jobs. They were not sustaining, there was not stability, the wages were low and we felt like we were actually doing a disservice to them. So we, we very intentionally corrected course but this is a key experience that we have and I'll, I'll build off this later on. You know, we see that, that wealth and income disparity is disproportionately affecting women and communities of color. And then we also experience that people with criminal backgrounds have significant difficulties securing non unionized jobs in the energy efficiency sector. We, we're really proud of, of many of our union partnerships who will take people on with backgrounds. In California we're experiencing a large volume of people who are coming out of the prison system. Many of whom are coming out due to reform which I think is fantastic. And we're running into the issue which is not a surprise to people but that folks with the background have a very, very challenging time getting into work. So we're grappling with the question of what it, what does it mean for you if you're released from the prison system to get a second shot at society but there are a ton of barriers in your way to having that second shot really be, be achieved in a meaningful way. So these are our experiences. I'm going to transition to my final portion which is our four recommendations for any policy or initiative or any work that's, that's trending in these, in these topics that we're talking about today. Our first recommendation is to really fund workforce development programs that have a racial gender and economic equity focus and that also have strong equity outcomes. So it's, you can't just have the focus, you have to follow through and actually achieve those outcomes. Any workforce development program also is not going to exist in a vacuum but rather it's going to, it has to be integrated into the larger economic, environmental and also climate context in which we all work and live on a day-to-day basis. Our second recommendation is to create targets and incentives to train in higher communities of color, women and the formerly incarcerated into energy efficiency jobs and the trades. You can't just fund the programs. These targets have to be there. We see a lot of local hiring provisions that go into certain jobs and contracts and local hiring can work and it also cannot work depending on how those are written. So what we really, you know, strongly recommend is that these local hiring provisions have to have these demographic targets built into them so that they're able to achieve that equity focus that I was talking about earlier. You know, we've seen very successful project labor agreements and community workforce agreements in particular. We're doing some work right now with the port of Oakland that has a very strong PLA that really works towards this equity focus. Our third recommendation is to track, monitor and measure the right metrics. We all know that what doesn't get measured is not going to happen. You know, we believe that people, organizations, companies are going to respond to incentives and we're going to ignore things that are not incentivized. So these metrics have to be the right ones and they have to then be followed up on this can't happen tangentially. It can't happen on the side or as an afterthought it shouldn't happen at 445 p.m. on a Friday. They have to be integral to the work that we do and part of integrating that is having the right funding and resources for program monitoring and evaluation. And our final recommendation that I'll share with you all before I wrap up is we very, very strongly recommend that energy efficiency jobs are high road jobs that create pathways out of poverty and into the middle class. And this term high road was coined by Carol Zaven out of UC Berkeley's Labor Center. It's, you know, as a synonym for high road, you can think of as high quality, right? These are jobs that are well paying but they're more than just well paying jobs. They have stability. They're benefited. So there's healthcare associated with it. There's opportunities for pensions, you know, vacation pay all these things that many of us I think sometimes will take for granted, but these are the different components that make up what a real high road job is. The folks who come through our doors and participate in our opportunity build program, leave that program on average making $18 and 46 cents an hour. And then we'll see them six months, nine months later as they're still working with us and we're doing income verification and it's very common that we see those wages double in that amount of time. So we're really proud of the fact that we are able to support people getting on to these high road pathways. You know, the society's return on investing in and creating these high road jobs and pathways is not just about the individual. It is about the individual, but the return we believe is far greater than that. So it's not just about someone getting on this pathway and having that job, but it's about the impact that that person has at home with his or her children able to provide not just money to put food on the table, but money to save towards college health care benefits that can be applied towards the whole whole family and opportunity to take a family vacation together, all these components again that work towards getting people out of poverty and into the middle class. I'll wrap up with sort of one of our organizational guiding values and beliefs and that is that we really feel at Rising Sun that it's both our moral and it's our societal imperative and obligation to make sure that these high road jobs exist, that they don't just exist, but that they abound, that they don't just exist. They're not just abundant, but also they're accessed in an equitable way so that it can lift all boats. I really appreciate being here. Speak with you all today. Look forward to your questions later on and thank you so much. Thank you so much, Phil. That's inspirational. Thank you for your good work. So I am now delighted to introduce our next speaker, Danelle Wilkins, who is president and CEO of Green Door Initiative. Danelle has dedicated her life's work toward improving the quality of life for Detroiters through environmental and social justice. She's the founding director of the Green Door Initiative and this is a non-profit organization promoting environmental justice in Michigan. I think you're sought after as a speaker and have won a lot of awards so we're delighted and very grateful to have you here. Well, good afternoon. It is a tough act to follow these three marvelous previous speakers but I hope to, you know, provide the kind of information that will keep us all motivated on this path of investing in our communities through energy efficiency and other sort of green color opportunities. I'm going to talk a little bit about who, what we do at the Green Door Initiative, who we serve, how we do that and talk a little bit about some of the opportunities that are coming our way and what we can do with those opportunities. So the Green Door Initiative is a non-profit organization in the city of Detroit. We were established in 2010. Our mission is to ensure that everyone is environmentally literate, capable of promoting and living out a sustainable lifestyle. And we look at that regardless of their zip code or income or race that everyone should have this opportunity to express a lifestyle that really rises the tide for a better quality of life. And we do that in a number of ways at the Green Door Initiative. While I will speak mostly about our workforce development work, we do invest in young people. We have a youth program called Code Green Champions on the Detroit environment where we're introducing young people to the environmental sector, the natural resources, and hopefully spike some interest in them to pursue a career either educationally or occupationally when it comes to protecting the natural resources. We do a workforce. We provide summer jobs and those kind of things. Pretty exciting citizen science and all of that. We also work in the space of public policy, particularly around environmental health, promoting quality when it comes to clean air, clean water, safe drinking water, and all those things. And if you know anything about Detroit, we're not very far from Flint. And so I'm sure you've been following the issues in Flint, Michigan, and quite frankly, those stories in Flint are not very different from the stories that are occurring in places like the city of Detroit. So we're focused on things in terms of improving environmental quality and policy around that. And then I would say that our work around promoting environmental health through research and engaging citizens in community-based participatory research in citizen science is one of the also some of the things that we do in the city of Detroit. But I want to speak today about the kind of work we're doing around workforce development. And we come to this work very differently from the other speakers. Our work really has to do with how do we improve the quality of the environment in Detroit and other places like Detroit using and doing this through an economic lens, and particularly when it comes to workforce development. I'd like to say that we are creating environmental heroes. And our model for our training program is we restore hope into people while we provide help to the planet. And we really believe that as we look at these two overarching issues in our community, high unemployment and high consistent pollution in our community, some work has to be done. There's plenty of work to do. And oftentimes the people who are bearing the greatest burden of those exposures and experiences are not really enjoying the economic opportunities that can come along. They're often sitting on the sideline watching other people who don't live in the community who are not burdened with those issues, get the work and actually get paid to do the work and get good living wages for that. And so we believe we have an opportunity to address two things, creating out that environmental hero by restoring the city of Detroit in places like Detroit using this training model that we do provide. Our training is very comprehensive and while we do address weatherization or energy efficiency, we really have been more focused on environmental cleanup. I like to say we have to clean up before we green up. And then as that row, there's a long trajectory when it comes to careers in the industry. And it can start at the cleanup piece to restore our communities and then to get into the green up where we're building and creating resiliency and sustainability all along that pathway. There are opportunities there. And we look for those opportunities to reinvest in our community, particularly when it comes to job training. So we are about restoring our environment. And the way that we do that, we provide a 12-week job training program. If selected, you will receive a scholarship and we like to say scholarship though it's no cost out of pocket for that individual that gets selected. We don't want them to think that this is some kind of welfare-branded kind of program. Oh, it's free and anybody can come through the door. While about a third of the people that we serve are people who happen to be returning back into society from previously incarceration. We also provide that training for folks who have barriers and chronic unemployment issues. And we do try to target a particular segment in the community that age group between 22 and 36 years old who happen to be African-American. I often like to think about our work as transforming lives while we're transforming our communities. We are also transforming lives. And I tell the folks that come into the program, look, this is really about you've been missing in action. You've been MIA. And what can we do to make certain that they become a serious part of our community and society and bring that missing piece back to their neighborhoods, back to their communities, and their families. So our training program really does provide an opportunity to train on a number of levels. While we do focus on like hazmat, disaster response, removing toxins, we come from the city of Detroit. We put the world on wheels. And because of that legacy and that history, when the world rolled away and decided they were going to produce and manufacture automobiles somewhere else, the waste and the toxins and whatever were left behind. So I often tell this story that at about 40,000 parcels when the city of Detroit decided to do an inventory of the brownfield size or polluted or complicated size in our community, they stopped at 40,000 inside the city of Detroit. And decided to designate the entire city a brownfield site. Well, Henry Ford, who had the vision for placing the world on wheels, his thought was, and it's not a bad one, he wanted his workforce to live close to where they were. He wanted to bring anything that had anything to do with building an automobile into that same footprint. And as a result, if we needed rubber, steel, oil, petrochemicals, whatever, all of that would be placed in close proximity so that that automobile could be made, right? And then in the 70s and 80s, the joke was the last one out of Detroit or the last one out of Michigan turned off the lights kind of deal. And when we turned back on the lights, it was like, ah, a horror story. Like what the heck, right? So Detroit gets this bad sort of story told about it, how dirty it is or whatever, but no one really talks about how that came about. So our natural resources have been impacted by it. The quality of life has been impacted by it. Well, someone has to do the work to clean it up again, to restore to great resiliency. Someone has to do that. And why not invest in the folks who carry that burden for a long time? And that's what we do. But in terms of energy, efficiency and investment, one of the things that I'm always thinking about, and my team is always thinking about, how do we expand this? Because this again is about providing a resource to our city and to our community when it comes to environmental cleanup, when it comes to resiliency and sustainability. And so we're always looking at ways to introduce new information, to introduce information and training that will support the industry so they can get the kind of individually need to help carry out the work that needs to be done. So while we do the work around cleanup and hazmat and disaster response and all of that, we also train them in construction. We train them in weatherization. We train them in wastewater treatment, stormwater management. Those things are relevant in our community. And if you know anything about sustainability, it has to the relevance where you are more local, the better. And so you build an economy and you build a strategy that meets those local needs. And that's what we're trying to do. As we partner with contractors and employers and others that really appreciate the quality of training that comes out of our program. They're standing at the door waiting for that next set of individuals to come out because the work is abundant in Detroit, as I said. And that might seem a little like disturbing, but apparently, you know, cleaning up this kind of stuff is needed. So, but recently we were approached by someone in the private sector who has become a rising star when it comes to energy efficiency. And she happens to be African-American, a woman who started in the late 1990s creating this vision and building this business. I mean, she started off sort of co-sharing office space or whatever with this vision of providing energy efficiency, energy auditing, understanding building envelopes and the built environment, all that that comes with that. Today, this woman has a workforce of over 100 people. She just purchased a building to accommodate her staff and she's growing. Well, we are really big on supporting that minority contractor, that minority firm as well, because we do know that they will hire people. So, Carla Walker Miller has a company, Walker Miller Energy Services. She approaches us and says, look, we know you're doing really great on building that capacity among folks in our community. We want to add something to this. We want to add training around BPI, the opportunity to really look at energy efficiency and try to find some folks that come through your program. So, we did connect and several of our people were able to join their training at the same time that they were involved in our training. And long story short, we actually are pleased to say in this last cohort, three of the individuals from our training of a 25 or so went through their training. They hired one of the first ones to come out of the training. A woman, happened to be a woman and her injury level job started at $30 an hour, working with Walker Miller. So, there is this opportunity. I appreciate the resources, the studies that have been done that gives me even greater hope about that we're on the right track and this idea of expanding to energy efficiency will only be a good deal for us in terms of the future and producing the kinds of job opportunities, family supporting jobs. And I will say that some of our folks even have started their own companies have come back to participate in job affairs and whatever and hiring folks that actually come through our training program. So, my deal is this, that if you're, you know, folks are a little weary or leery about hiring you. Look, let's see what we can do to help you become an entrepreneur to support you in that way. And that's been a good strategy. That I think will work. So, that's not the end of the story for them. That's not the end of the story for us. That's the end of this presentation for me, though. Thank you very much for listening. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Donnell. So, last but never least, Lauren Asplin. I am so happy to introduce from the Blue-Green Alliance. Lauren is the director of the Blue-Green Alliance Healthy Sustainability Program and has more than two decades experience working with trade unions, primarily in the manufacturing and transportation sectors. Her involvement with environmental issues started with the 1990 Earth Tech Fair. I remember that. I was there. Yeah, I got that t-shirt too. So, most recently, she spearheaded a program that gained White House recognition as a champion of change for engaging frontline workers in identifying energy efficiency opportunities. So, Lauren, welcome. Thank you for being here. There we go. That's OK. Well, now I get to follow two magnificent examples of boots on the ground and take it back up a little bit to policy. But hopefully, I'm going to add a little bit of a different perspective. But first, I want to thank Helen, ESI, Kaleel, IFA and RDC for organizing this. And I especially want to ask you, John, to convey our appreciation to Representative Rush for his leadership on this really critical issue. It's nice to have somebody championing our causes these days, finally. A little bit about the Blue Green Alliance Foundation, for those of you who don't know, we were founded in 2006 by the Sierra Club and the still workers when they realized that we really had more in common than we had different in that if we worked together, we could achieve a lot more. And that sounds now maybe like that makes sense. But back then, that really wasn't an accepted concept. And it was a challenge for both of those organizations to make that decision and create the Blue Green Alliance. One of the core principles was that fixing the environment and fixing the economy with job growth went hand in hand. And even more than that was that you could not achieve those goals unless you were working together. And we've been here before about town and green jobs. I mean, everyone at this panel has done that before. And I think that one of the key messages that wasn't conveyed very well was that green jobs aren't just jobs making wind turbines or solar panels or installing solar panels. And green jobs are, it's funny because there really are what we're talking about here. The most important and basic energy efficiency are the green jobs. That's where the bulk of them are and yet somehow we all miss that. And I think part of it is the wind turbines and solar panels are all shiny and new. And quite frankly, they make much better pictures. And so we all put them on the top of our presentations and on our reports and stuff. And so the visual carried the day regardless of what we said. And people went out there looking for those types of jobs. And so when you had workers who were losing their jobs in the auto industry elsewhere and were looking for new jobs or you had new entrants, children coming out of school and they went to go find these jobs. They did not see them because that wasn't what we were talking about in the sense of where the real jobs were. And so then they assumed that this green jobs promise was really false. Or that it was happening in some state many hundreds of miles away from them and that it wasn't something that they were gonna have a chance to participate in. And that really is a shame. And I think that that's why you're hearing us trying to turn this around again and emphasize energy efficiency. In the 2019 user report on energy employment which came out this spring, it found that energy efficiency jobs again increased. The one that keeps increasing. 76,000 new jobs and they again are expected to increase. And for a variety of reasons you actually don't see that in solar and wind, a lot of it having to do with inconsistency in funding and subsidies. And I would actually argue that the numbers that are reported are very conservative because I have done your homework for you and actually read the fine print. And what they do is they only count as energy efficiency jobs, workers who are either installing or manufacturing products that fall under the energy star label. And I would argue that there are a lot of products out there that for a variety of reasons don't have that label but are still highly energy efficient and those workers should be counted as well within that. So I think that's good news. There's more out there than we even think or recognize. And the fact is that if you're replacing a 30-year-old boiler, you're gonna get a more energy efficient product regardless of whether it's certified or not. I mean, technology just keeps advancing and there could be something out there with maybe higher energy efficiency but it's still gonna be more efficient than what you're replacing. It's kind of ironic though about the misimpression about energy efficiency because that is the one thing that the public really gets. And so if we talked about it, like they would totally get that, right? I mean, whether you're old enough to remember the put on your sweater so we can turn down the heat or whether you now it's like a second nature to look for the energy star label. I mean, this is something that people really get if you explain it to them and it's something that our government gets and actually wants to fund. So it was still happening. There was just this kind of disconnect that's out here but part of the problem too is I think we've all been here before even touting energy efficiency jobs. And we saw at times big ramp-ups like to do weatherization work and there were job training centers like popping up overnight about that but there wasn't any plans after that. And so funding dried up, the jobs went away, these workers were only semi-skilled. There was no plans about, no way to move them forward. They didn't have any certifications for even the skills that they had. So new employers didn't have anything to base their assessment on what the work was. And so we left these semi-skilled workers with no ladder to climb up and no one to show them a better way to these family sustaining jobs. Report isn't out and this is my language so Cahill can contradict me but I'm gonna say that we need an end game, okay? That this is about not only identifying workers and community members and getting them trained on new technologies and into these jobs that are needed, these skill jobs that are needed but also to create good jobs and that you can't do that without intention and without putting workers standards in there from the start. This has to be the package that we move forward with and not just hope it's gonna happen some way farther down the road. It's gotta be all in there together. BJAF is very proud of work that it actually did in California to help attach workers standards to energy efficiency spending that they're doing in low income communities including local hire agreements but also high road workers standards. So they're coming out and after workers are trained they will have a pathway. They will have a way to build their skills. Certainly many of the BJAF partners and we expanded, I missed that step from us from still workers and Sierra Club to many other unions and environmental organizations and our partners in the trades have been making a true effort to expand the opportunity and access to their training and apprenticeship programs. Examples that are out there are the utility workers, the bricklayers who are so active in this area and the sheet metal workers whose new headquarters and training centers actually lead platinum. That's the commitment that they went to show is they're not just gonna talk about it they're gonna live it. The work that I do is in a program called Building Clean and its premise is to buy local and buy healthy. And this is where that first slide about supercharging the economy comes in. If we spend energy efficiency dollars, which we do, we have to make sure that we're getting the best economic and public health benefit we can get. Everybody's heard of the triple bottom line and I call this tripling your money while only spending one dollar. Because if you do it right, you can get a lot of things out of that one dollar that we're already spending, which we're in a place where people like to do more with the exact same amount, right? And so that goes over pretty well. And I have to say I love, and this is just a side note, the work that they do on the health part too and all of that. I know we're here to talk about jobs, but as Ellen knows, I can never not talk about health in anything I do. And that's another factor that's really important is that as we're spending this money is making sure that we're detoxifying the environment by making sure that what we're buying and doing isn't just adding more chemicals to those legacy chemicals that already exist and poisoning our bodies and the environment. Where we wanna talk about jobs though is the first part, which is the buy local. And that can be the real job multiplier. We're spending public dollars on energy efficiency, but we're not buying US made products or requiring that those be bought. And if we go a little bit beyond just the retrofits, which truly are, I know the bulk of the jobs, but look at manufacturing. That's about 20% of efficiency jobs. It's supposed to grow by 6% next year. But what if we said the dollars that we're spending should be spent on local goods and US made goods? What would the impact be? How many more jobs will we have in manufacturing? And it certainly is really evident when you look at communities where manufacturers and plants have closed, what that impact is to the community when those jobs leave. It's not just about the unemployment, it's the tax base, it's the charitable donations. It's a lot. And so having a manufacturer as kind of a base in a community, we know that that is strong. They're stable jobs. They tend to be more high road jobs. And there's a lot that we can do here. And for us, we think that kind of the other piece now that's being missed is the emphasis or some thought given to also including manufacturer jobs in this process. Because once again, we need to sustain our people and our communities. And this is a great vehicle to do it. Let's just get it right this time. Thank you. All right, well said. Thank you, Lauren. And so I am happy to take your questions now. So I see a lot of them. So let's just start right here. Yes. So my question is particularly for Phil and Donnell. So what do you or what variables do you think helped to explain your success in building secure stable pathways for people, particularly people of color, women, and accessing jobs? Let's see. Oh, I need to push up. So the question is what are the sort of steps needed to ensure the success of reaching out and ensuring that they take full advantage and are able to get through it? And I think I can speak to our model. So our starting with recruitment and sort of the message that makes the work relevant because you typically are not attracting people of color and women to the industry in our communities unless you make it relevant. So our message is about the health of the community, the opportunities inherent in the industry and what they can do to make a difference in the work. The way that we design the training, the training of the first six weeks of our program really is about life skills, but we focus on doing some things a little differently. One, we ensure that the people that they interact with, the trainers and resources look like them in the industry and so that they can see folks like them are doing well in the industry. That's one thing. We provide counseling support. We may not be able to meet all their needs, but there are opportunities for one-on-one counseling and group counseling that hit on some key sort of deals that provide tips and strategies for removing any personal barriers that might be in their way. And we also address the social justice elements. I didn't talk earlier about sort of this idea, I did mention the admission in action kind of deal, MIA, but that we need to see them in city council meetings and block club meetings, being involved in the community, helping to be an ambassador on these issues. So it's bigger than a job, though I'm happy that they get one. I'm delighted, but I'm more delighted about the transformation and the commitment they may make to restoring their communities and adding their unique part to that. So they make a good living, wonderful, hey, but join this army of folks trying to help us restore our communities. That's the message that's intertwined throughout. We do provide a social justice lens in this work. So Danelle and I were actually speaking before we came up here and there was a lot of overlap in our work. So she echoed a lot of, I think our experience is very similar to what a lot of she just shared. A couple points I'll elaborate on is the point that Danelle made about women. We actually run, once a year, a cohort in our opportunity build program that's exclusively women. So it's a cohort of only women that are then supported to getting into the trades and an obstacle or variable that we encounter is what Danelle mentioned, perception. There's a strong perception out there that the trades is not for women. And so that's an initial hurdle that we have to work with and combat is that even though as a percentage, yes, women are very small in the trades, that number is growing and that there is a real place and role for women in the trades. You know, one of the things that has helped us be successful in that is the success historically of our program over time and it's fed on itself in a positive feedback loop. So as we're able to support more women getting into the trades, we're able to get more women easier through our doors to support and train them. And then the other point that I'll mention in terms of variables, I mean under the umbrella of barriers to employment it's not, I think it's stuff that many people take for granted on day-to-day basis but that present real barriers for people. The main one that we see a lot of is actually the lack of having a valid driver's license. And so it's not, I'm not sharing anything groundbreaking but once you get into it and see how it plays it's actually quite powerful. People who have something on their record, they have a DUI or something so there's a barrier to getting a driver's license. Other people just have never got one. Other people are intimidated by the bureaucratic process, whatever it is. We found that there are many barriers to employment and getting people over that hurdle of getting a driver's license is actually one of the most powerful ways that we can really support people. Yes, in the back. I'm sorry. Did you all wanna add to that? Anybody else? Questions for Rising Sun Center. You mentioned hundreds of thousands of houses needing weatherization and retrofitting. How do you find those homes? Second question is what jobs do women get in your industry? So the question being how do you know which buildings need the retrofits? How do you find those? How do you find the clients essentially? Yeah. And then the women, what jobs are they taking? Yeah, anyone? So we, in terms of accessing the homes that need the energy efficiency retrofits, our outreach is very grassroots and community-based. We set up shop at farmers markets at community-based events and spread the word about what we do. We get referrals but we have a pretty strong community-based marketing effort to really reach those people and raise awareness of what we do. A lot of it is actually sharing some of the physical devices that we install, so whether it's lighting. This year we've started doing some work with smart thermostats. I think when people start seeing these devices, it allows us to put some more power behind the work that we do. And then you asked about what jobs there are for women. The jobs for women are the same that are the jobs for men out there. To what I mentioned earlier, I think some of the barriers is perception, but once we're able to get people's skills developed and trained, the women that we work with are able to access the same jobs that other people are. So in terms of locating, identifying, knowing the housing, there's a relationship with the local utility companies. And oftentimes the utility companies have provisions in our local community, DTE, I'm joking but I didn't mention it, which is an electric gas company. They have the thought programs that you need in your work program. Well, mostly folks who are struggling need those resources to pay their utility bills or whatever. So there are local state programs and provisions they need to make those jobs available to households that need that income level. And in that, there is your resource for identifying individuals that commitment from an energy audit and weatherization approach. So that's just one strategy in the other outreach efforts in the community and stuff to reinforce and promote those programs so that people take advantage of a free program like that. When it comes to women, yes, I would add that our approach is really comprehensive, like I said before. And we do find that there are opportunities in the environmental consulting sectors. There's even work at academic institutions and whatever, we've been able to place women so that they can be a resource in their community in terms of community-based research activities. They get the fundamental training from us and they can understand and speak the language and know how that industry works. But they also can be a resource in terms of interpreting information when it comes to projects that they've taken place in the community and they are the community that we aim on. If you will, we've done that at the University of Michigan on several public health projects and it's been really effective when it comes to women. In the partner industries, it's difficult for them to sort of sustain some patients. So they may not stay long into that particular field in heavy labor, you know, but we have found pathways in other industries. So we just need to remind that we want to be as flexible as possible in building the relationships that we believe to hire and provide a pathway for both of us. Thank you. Yeah, and to the point on where to find the need for the retrofits, I know like the weatherization program has a waiting list. I mean, there's a great need for that. Thank you for the funding increases. It's so important. But yeah, I think that also raises the issue of, you know, programs that can help with these upfront costs and again, utilities, but also a lot of the coalitions. IFA is working with the state local groups. Yeah, they're doing a lot of outreach, but there certainly is a need for, even though energy efficiency has positive benefits in terms of life cycle cost savings, you do this work, you're gonna save a lot of money over the long run, you're gonna have reduced energy bills and all the benefits that go along with that, but you still have to do the work. You still have to get that job funded. So I think financing is critically important. And again, thank you for addressing this in your legislation. It's all part of it. So yeah, thank you. Other questions? Yes. Hi, I'm Beth Offenbecker with Waterford, Ankama Public Affairs Consultant. My question has to do with supporting entrepreneurship. I think that's something that Mr. Marshall mentioned and I think Mr. Shahid as well. I'm interested to hear about how these programs also help open that door, because I think that is a really important part. Like sometimes you can't go through the door, you have to build the door, right? And so how do we help people, these programs, I'm interested to hear and some strategies that we can replicate and encourage more entrepreneurial realism among women and among communities of colors and communities of color. And thank you. Great question. Anyone want to start on that? Oh, I can't mention just real quick. I did mention earlier about the unintended benefits that has resulted from our training for that particular reason. You can create your own. So there's a program in our local community called Prosperous and it's about helping small entrepreneurs get started. We may not be able to provide all the needs of our community and the people we serve, but what we do is work with other community resources and bring them in. So there are times where guest speakers come in, they get to promote their program and folks get to elect to participate in that. And that's one way that some of the folks who have come back to even participate in job fairs, hiring the people is based on them at accessing those kind of programs and it's a free program that provides even small capital once you get through the program to help with some startup costs. Yeah, the only thing I would add to that is that from a policy perspective, it's just important, particularly for example, if you're dealing with utility programs because sometimes the contracting requirements, might say you need X number of years of experience doing this type of contract which in and of itself is a barrier for new entrants to be able to come into that market. And so we want to try to ease some of those eligibility requirements for contracting, particularly with utilities. You can also do that through local hire initiatives that require a certain portion of the workforce to come from a local area, which can more likely tend to, okay, so it's gonna be a local entrepreneur that's gonna be employed to do it as opposed to someone who's outside of the parish from Louisiana or County, et cetera. So there are a number of ways you can try to incentivize that, but really you have to deal with those direct barriers to new entrants into that market. Yes. Within the federal government, there are opportunities for entrepreneurship that a lot of people are even aware of. So within DOE, there's a program called the Federal Energy Management Program. It was basically said that every GSA-owned building, every building that's owned by the federal government is on schedule to be retrofitted at some point over the next decade or so. And so there's a list of contracts that DOE keeps and my boss asked about this inherent that we had. Of course, he asked how many minority contractors were on that list and the answer as always. Well, we don't know if we'll get back to you, but the answer was actually zero. And so there are some opportunities even within the federal government. These are multi-million dollar contracts that last for 20 years. Basically, they're capital intensive upfront. So a company will come in and do these retrogrades and put the money in the front for the next 20 years. They're guaranteed to get paid by the federal government on a monthly or yearly basis. And so a lot of these programs that are out there, people are not even aware of. Minority contractors specifically are not aware of. And so that's another project I'm working on right now. It's some legislation to try to make sure we engage our communities, make sure that they're aware of them and also help them build the capacity to take on these types of projects and which are basically backed by the federal government. So energy savings performance contracts? Is that what you're thinking of? Yeah, that's another one that does also help with that upfront cost. So it's the guaranteed savings pay for the work. You don't have to have that upfront. Yeah, thank you. And that reminds me also that energy efficiency, quality energy efficient buildings and other infrastructure. It's more resilient. And as Danelle mentioned, the natural disasters and the way they're affecting are every state I think and all communities. They affect the underserved, under-resourced communities even more. And there's a huge need to improve the resilience of these durability, but energy efficiency and quality and health, you know, the cleanup before your green up. I like that. There are, it's related, it's all related. And it reminds me also that FEMA is looking through legislation that Congress passed last year, Disaster Recovery Reform Act. FEMA is developing a program now that's gonna implement this major investment in disaster and pre-disaster mitigation, which we would like to see more of that, wouldn't we? That we don't have to always be helping people out of a terrible situation of destruction and loss, but that we can prevent that in many cases. And so I think that's a bite at the apple to improve efficiency and resilience at the same time. And so getting the federal agencies to work together, DOE, FEMA, Small Business Administration, they offer loans after disaster. So anyway, that's something to maybe think about. Other questions? We have a couple more minutes, I think. Over on this side, yeah. This question is particularly for Don Allen, Phil. Sorry to the rest of the panel, but if anyone has input, feel free to add some. So for jobs, for people who are coming, other than the obvious incentive of wanting a career and wanting a job, what other messages are you getting about why people are coming to Green Door and coming to Rise and Sun? Are they motivated by climate change, by environmental justice, by struggling to pay their bills? Where are these motivating factors coming from? Well, overarching, they want a job. But secondary to that, because we do provide information throughout the training about environmental justice, and we provide real data about what's going on locally, then people become extra motivated. And that's where that whole thought of creating environmental heroes come in, because we do a lot of community awareness and building environmental awareness. Like, how do you report an environmental release? What does the Safe Drinking Water Law really means to you? How does the Clean Air Act apply to you? And then we begin to introduce, we always have sort of this orientation so that we begin to introduce, here's the work connected to each of these elements. Somebody has to rebuild Flint's infrastructure, right? Someone has to do the work at when they decommission a power plant or something like that. Those things may not be the sexy kind of jobs, but they're good jobs. So yeah, and then they learn about their eyes are open when it comes to environmental justice and injustices, and they learn about the opportunities and resources that may be there. But we're always in the community. We're always trying to remain relevant as an organization and meeting their needs at that level is key to get them into the door. And we see a pretty even split between our two programs, so our youth program and adult program. The Opportunity Build program, people are motivated to come and improve their lives, and that's really around wages and finding these quality jobs. And then our youth program, we experience something different, which I find highly inspiring and encouraging, which is that many of the youth, I mean they want the job, they wanna get paid, and they're also really invested in and committed to improving their communities through the lens of climate change and climate resilience. So yeah, I think it depends where people are, obviously in their station in life, but those are what we experience. Thank you for that question. Thank you. The young people will save us, we hope. Any other questions? We have maybe one more minute, one more question. In the back, oh sorry, yes sir. Maybe two more. Hi there, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today. My name is David Yoswico. I'm a student at Stanford. But my big question is one thing that Phil mentioned is that not all energy efficiency jobs are quality jobs. And so I would like to hear what your thoughts are and what are key steps in improving the quality of these jobs and making them attractive to people so that we can employ them and improve our environment and our economy in general. Well I can begin by just sharing that it's about relationships with employers and contractors and other. And when we learn about bad players, they're outed. They're confronted. We've had one situation where the workers learned that some people at the same site doing the same work were making much more money than they were. And so this was a prevailing wage particular job and folks were getting prevailing wage but our folks were not. And of course it was divided by race. And so they got the contract because they had to have folks from the local community involved in those projects. But they didn't I guess expect people to share what they were making. So my job developer when came to me and was like Darnell, I feel so strongly about this. I think we need to do something. Well let's talk to the contractor first, right? And we did and the person just the threat of someone finding out that they were doing it that way. They stopped their practice and retroactively paid our people. So we have to always be, and now this was a non-union shop, right? And we don't always have access to those union jobs. For a lot of the same reasons we don't have access to job period. And so when we can, of course we want people who are in those jobs where labor contracts exist and that kind of stuff. But we have even found that people sit on the bench waiting to be assigned a job. Sometimes if they're going through the union path, just to be honest. And so the deal is that we want to make certain that our folks understand that they are a value. They are added value. They bring something to the table for these companies to be able to build their profits and what have you and that they gotta go there. So we really emphasize like health and safety. That's very key. Some of our, one of our resources, the National Environmental Institute of, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIHS under NIH is one of our major funders. And it overemphasize worker health and safety. And we like that. So people know that it's important that they have personal protective equipment and they have respiratory equipment those kind of things and that the employer is required to make those provisions available to them. And when they don't, they know how to deal with the laws at hand. And we've had a couple of our guys refuse to work for a company when they know that those practices are endangering not only them, but endangering the community. Again, that social justice piece is real key as we take them through our training program. So it's not always pretty, but I have to remain, I have to be in places like this, places at city council, places at the city level, state level, whatever, to make certain that folks who make decisions, policymakers understand how important it is that they provide the right sort of enforcement and lens on the laws and whatever that they're responsible to shepherd. So. I mean, again, I think Denel said it really nicely. I don't think that the union model is bulletproof, but I think that it's a strong reference point and it contains these safeguards for these sort of high road jobs that we're talking about. I think it's hard, it's difficult for me to imagine how we really expand those without deeply integrating into the policy work that's being done. That has to be driven by policy, whether it's, that can look different ways. It can be federal policy, it can be state, it can be, we interact with a lot of municipal policies, so city codes and ordinances or initiatives, but there has to be some driver at the policy level, I think, to expand the role of some of those union jobs and the benefits that they bring. I would just add that I think that, and I agree with Denel that there's many different ways that you can approach this and union is just one of them, but one of the key elements in the union is the apprenticeship process, and I think that's universally regarded as successful programs to bring people along so that they're trained and they get money at the same time and it's internationally accepted. And so we need to keep those strong and not undermine them. And I think there's also some really good work going on in creating additional career pathways with industry, so the jobs that industry needs, they're developing some apprenticeship programs as well that can connect directly with communities, with high schools even, as well as post-secondary schools. So yeah, there's a big need. So we're out of time, but I think we'll be here for a couple of minutes if anyone has any additional questions. Bottom line, energy efficiency jobs are green jobs. We need everyone to have access to these jobs for the benefit of our society, the environment and the economy. So thank you all so much for coming and thank you. Our panel has been wonderful. Thank you.