Van Jones

Van Jones
Van Jones as White House Council on Environmental Quality's Special Advisor for Green Jobs, 2009
Born	September 20, 1968
Nationality	United States
Education	University of Tennessee at Martin Yale Law School
Occupation(s)	Civil Rights, Human Rights, and Environmental Activist
Employer	White House Council on Environmental Quality
Known for	2009 Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People 2009 New York Times Bestselling Author
Title	Special Advisor for Green Jobs

Van Jones (born September 20, 1968) is the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

He is an environmental advocate, a civil rights activist and attorney, and an author. Formerly based in Oakland, California, Jones is the founder of Green For All, a national NGO dedicated to "building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty." His first book, The Green Collar Economy, released on October 7, 2008, was a New York Times bestseller. Jones also founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a California NGO working for alternatives to violence and incarceration.

In 2008, Time magazine named Jones one of its "Environmental Heroes." Fast Company called him one of the "12 Most Creative Minds of 2008."

Early life

Van Jones was born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee. His father was a junior-high-school principal and his mother was a high-school teacher. His grandfather was the leader of the Christian Methodist—formerly Colored Methodist—Episcopal Church. As a child, Jones was, by his own description, “bookish and bizarre.” When his parents gave him Luke Skywalker and Han Solo action figures, instead of arranging them to fight he would have them run for imaginary public offices. His twin sister, Angela, remembers him as “the stereotypical geek—he just kind of lived up in his head a lot.” During the summers, Jones accompanied his grandfather to religious conferences, where he recalls sitting “in these hot, sweaty black churches,” listening to the adults talk, all day and into the night. He graduated from Jackson Central-Merry High School in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1986. After earning his B.A. from the University of Tennessee at Martin, Jones left his home state to attend Yale Law School. In 1993, Jones earned his J.D. and moved to San Francisco.

Social and environmental activism

Early activism

In 1992, during a protest of the Rodney King verdict in San Francisco, police officers illegally arrested Jones and hundreds of other participants in a peaceful protest march. Jones, at the time a law student at Yale Law School, participated as a volunteer, legal monitor. The District Attorney later dropped the charges against Jones. The unlawfully arrested protesters, including Jones, won a small legal settlement. The incident deepened Jones's "disaffection with the system and accelerated his political radicalization".

Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

In 1995, Jones started Bay Area PoliceWatch, the region's only bar-certified hotline and lawyer-referral service for victims and survivors of police abuse. PoliceWatch began as a project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, but by 1996 had grown big enough to seed a new umbrella NGO, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

From 1996-1997, Jones and PoliceWatch led a successful campaign to get officer Marc Andaya fired from the San Francisco Police Department. Andaya was the lead officer responsible for the in-custody death of Aaron Williams, an unarmed black man. In 1999 and 2000, Jones was a major leader in the failed campaign to defeat Proposition 21, which sparked a vibrant youth and student movement that made national headlines. In 2001, Jones and Ella Baker Center launched the Books Not Bars campaign. From 2001-2003, Jones and Books Not Bars led a successful campaign to block the construction of a proposed "Super-Jail for Youth" in Oakland's Alameda County. Books Not Bars later went on to launch a statewide campaign to transform California's juvenile justice system. That campaign is still winning major reforms.

In 2005 the Ella Baker Center expanded its vision beyond the immediate concerns of policing, declaring that "If we really wanted to help our communities escape the cycle of incarceration, we had to start focusing on job, wealth and health creation."

In 2005, Van and the Ella Baker Center produced the "Social Equity Track" for the United Nations' World Environment Day celebration, held that year in San Francisco. It was the official beginning of what would eventually become Ella Baker Center's Green-Collar Jobs Campaign.

The Green-Collar Jobs Campaign was Jones' first concerted effort to combine his lifelong commitment to racial and economic justice with his newer commitment to solving the environmental crisis. It soon took as its mission the establishment of the nation's first "Green Jobs Corps" in Oakland. On October 20, 2008, the City of Oakland formally launched the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, a public-private partnership that will "provide local Oakland residents with job training, support, and work experience so that they can independently pursue careers in the new energy economy."

Green For All

In September, 2007, Jones attended the Clinton Global Initiative and announced his plans to launch Green For All, a new national NGO dedicated to creating green pathways out of poverty in America. The plan grew out of the work previously done at local level at the Ella Baker Center. Green For All would take the Green-Collar Jobs Campaign mission — creating green pathways out of poverty — national.

Green For All formally opened its doors on January 1, 2008. In its first year, Green For All organized "The Dream Reborn," the first national green conference where the majority of attendees were people of color. It co-hosted, with 1Sky and the We Campaign, a national day of action for the new economy called "Green Jobs Now." It launched the Green-Collar Cities Program to help cities build local green economies. It started the Green For All Capital Access Program to assist green entrepreneurs. And Green For All, as part of the Clean Energy Corps Working Group, launched a campaign for a Clean Energy Corps initiative which would create 600,000 'green-collar' jobs while retrofitting and upgrading more than 15 million American buildings.

In reflecting on Green For All's first year, Jones wrote, "One year later, Green For All is real – and we have helped put green collar jobs on the map…We have a long way to go. But today we have a strong organization to help get us there."

Other

Jones has also served on the boards of numerous environmental and nonprofit organizations, including 1Sky, the National Apollo Alliance, Social Venture Network, Rainforest Action Network, Bioneers, Julia Butterfly Hill’s "Circle of Life" organization and Free Press. He was also a Senior Fellow with the Center for American Progress and a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He recently was a key speaker at the youth conference PowerShift 2009 in Washington, D.C. In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Jones co-founded a Web-based grassroots organization addressing Black issues called Color of Change. Jones left the organization several years later to move on to other pursuits, such as Green For All.

The Green Collar Economy

On October 7, 2008, HarperOne released Jones's first book, The Green Collar Economy. The book outlines Jones's "substantive and viable plan for solving the biggest issues facing the country--the failing economy and our devastated environment." The book has received favorable reviews from such environmental activists as Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Laurie David, Paul Hawken, Winona LaDuke and Ben Jealous.

Jones had a limited publicity budget and no national media platform. But a viral, web-based marketing strategy earned the book a #12 debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Jones and Green For All used "a combination of emails and phone calls to friends, bloggers, and a network of activists" to reach millions of people. The marketing campaign's grassroots nature has led to Jones calling it a victory not for him but for the entire green-collar jobs movement.

The Green Collar Economy is the first environmental book authored by an African-American to make the New York Times bestseller list.

White House Council on Environmental Quality

On March 10, 2009, it was announced that Jones would serve as Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the President’s agenda of creating 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources. Jones will also help to shape and advance the Administration’s energy and climate initiatives with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities.

— Nancy Sutley

Jones position with the Obama Administration has been described as "switchboard operator for Obama's grand vision of the American economy; connecting the phone lines between all the federal agencies invested in a green economy."

Jones' responsibility is to work within all the government agencies to make sure the $30 billion from the stimulus earmarked for green-jobs funding attached to it gets "doled out appropriately."

Political Evolution

Jones started his career as a staunch critic of capitalism; his outrage over the Rodney King verdict radicalized him to the point where he declared himself a communist (which he has since renounced) and actively began protesting police brutality. He later got involved with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a collective which "dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia". Frustrated keeping coalitions together to make positive social change, Jones "discarded the hostility and antagonism with which he had previously greeted the world, which he said was part of the ego-driven romance of being seen as a revolutionary." "Before, we would fight anybody, any time," Jones says of his tranformation. "No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward. ... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends". Jones ended his involvement with STORM (and STORM officially dissolved in December 2002).

By the late 1990s, Jones began promoting capitalism as he transformed into an evironmentally friendly capitalist. He emerged as one of the foremost champions of green business, entrepreneurship and market-based solutions. In his 2008 best seller The Green Collar Economy, Jones contended that invention and investment will take us out of a pollution-based grey economy and into a healthy new green economy. Jones wrote:

[W]e are entering an era during which our very survival will demand invention and innovation on a scale never before seen in the history of human civilization. Only the business community has the requisite skills, experience, and capital to meet that need. On that score, neither government nor the nonprofit and voluntary sectors can compete, not even remotely.

So in the end, our success and survival as a species are largely and directly tied to the new eco-entrepreneurs — and the success and survival of their enterprises. Since almost all of the needed eco-technologies are likely to come from the private sector, civic leaders and voters should do all that can be done to help green business leaders succeed. That means, in large part, electing leaders who will pass bills to aid them. We cannot realistically proceed without a strong alliance between the best of the business world —and everyone else.

Awards and honors

Jones's awards and honors include:

2009 - New York Times Bestselling Author for The Green Collar Economy

2009 - Time 100 Most Influential People, Time Magazine

2009 - selected as one of the Ebony Power 150

2009 - the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award, presented to those who best exemplify selfless and devoted service in the cause of equality.

• 2009 - "Rolling Stone 100: Agents of Change” (#89); Rolling Stone Magazine
• 2009 - Eco-Entrepreneur Award, Institute for Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Innovation; Howard University
• 2009 - Individual Thought Leadership, Energy & Environment Awards; Aspen Institute
• 2008 - One of 17 “Sexiest Men Living”; Salon.com
• 2008 - Best Dressed Environmental List (#1 of 30); Sustainable Style Foundation

2008 - Time Magazine Environmental Hero

2008 - designation as one of Essence Magazine's 25 most influential/inspiring African-Americans

• 2008 - Elle Magazine Green Award
• 2008 - One of the George Lucas Foundation's "Daring Dozen"
• 2008 - Hunt Prime Mover Award
• 2008 - Campaign for America's Future "Paul Wellstone Award";
• 2008 - Global Green USA "Community Environmental Leadership" Award
• 2008 - designation as one of the nation's "Plenty 20" in the October/November 2008 edition of Plenty Magazine
• 2008 - San Francisco Foundation Community Leadership Award
• 2008 - One of Fast Company's "12 Most Creative Minds"

2008 - Puffin/Nation prize for "Creative Citizenship"

2008 - World Economic Forum "Young Global Leader"

2000 - International Ashoka Fellowship

• 1998 - Reebok International Human Rights Award
• 1997-1999 - Rockefeller Foundation "Next Generation Leadership" Fellowship

In 2008, Tom Friedman profiled Van in his bestselling book, Hot, Flat & Crowded. Also in 2008, Wilford Welch featured him in the book Tactics of Hope, and Joel Makower highlighted Van's ideas in the book Strategies for the Green Economy.

Publications

• The Green Collar Economy: A Revolutionary Plan to End Global Warming, Beat Poverty, and Unite America HarperOne (2008)

See also

• Social Justice
• Green job
• Green collar worker

Further reading

• Kolbert, Elizabeth (2009). "The Political Scene: Greening the Ghetto". The New Yorker. 84 (44): 22–28. Retrieved 27 March 2009. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |day= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

External links

• Van Jones' personal website
• Biography of Van Jones
• 'Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in California', The Nathan Cummings Foundation (2004) Retrieved January 28 2007.
• Van Jones' blogs at The Huffington Post
• 'Van Jones: Speak Truth to Power Defender' Speaktruth.org (2007 interview) Retrieved February 06 2007.