Growing Green Jobs in the South Bronx

“It hit me that the com­mu­nity I came from was just like all of those other places that I would be going to. The South Bronx was basi­cally an under­de­vel­oped coun­try within a coun­try,” Freilla told The Huffington Post. “If I was going any­where, I needed to go home.”

Freilla recalls at age 10 look­ing across the high­way from his family’s apart­ment at the aban­doned build­ings and real­iz­ing that com­muters pass­ing through the highly traf­ficked cor­ri­dor of New York City saw a more pleas­ant pic­ture: the build­ings’ vacan­cies were masked by paint­ings of silhouettes.

That stuck with Freilla, who also rec­og­nized early that com­pa­nies used the low-income com­mu­nity of color as a “dump­ing ground,” with waste facil­i­ties, sludge oper­a­tions, dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters and power plants in close prox­im­ity. What’s more, a lot of goods were sim­ply trucked through, chok­ing res­i­dents with diesel fumes.

Among other health prob­lems that might be attrib­uted to this “envi­ron­men­tal racism,” noted Freilla, are excep­tion­ally high asthma rates: an esti­mated 12 times the national average.

So with his acquired knowl­edge and exper­tise in the envi­ron­ment and social jus­tice, Freilla returned to his roots. And after stints as a trans­porta­tion coor­di­na­tor at the community-based New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and work­ing with Sustainable South Bronx, he launched the Green Worker Cooperatives in 2003.

“I wanted to see jobs in our com­mu­ni­ties that pro­mote life instead of tak­ing it away,” Freilla said.

But before res­i­dents could take up these kinds of jobs, he knew they needed busi­nesses to house them.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at HuffingtonPost.com.