Briefing Series: Workforce Wednesdays

Find out more about the briefings in this series below, or read our key takeaways.

• Technological innovation and workforce disruption by COVID-19 have both elevated the need for Americans to learn new skills and transition into new careers.

• Education and learning institutions need to develop a “culture of lifelong learning” in order to prepare for unpredictable changes in the economy. This requires new tools and collaboration between business, educators, and the government.

• Olathe West High School's Green Tech Academy was started, in part, from labor demands from local companies needing energy and sustainability employees. Olathe reached out to local and national companies and developed a four-year energy curriculum.

• Ocean Springs High School's aquaculture program started in 2016. Students have gone into salmon research, started horticulture companies, and grown their own food using aquaponics to sell to grocery stores and markets.

• Conservation Legacy's Ancestral Lands program was created in 2008 to address barriers Native youth faced participating in and successful completing conservation corps programs. Five to ten crew members work in the field for ten to twelve days at a time on conservation projects, such as trail construction, habitat restoration, invasive species removal, and historical preservation (largely on ancestral Puebloan sites).

• Green Forests Work is a nonprofit organization that restores healthy, productive native forests to lands that have been disturbed by surface mining across the Appalachian region. The program not only improves the environment, but also creates economic and employment opportunities.

• Green City Force (GCF) is a nonprofit based in New York City, which focuses on bringing youth from public housing into the green economy through service. It works to build up black and brown leadership, giving its corps members the skills to become competitive applicants in their fields.

• Coal families have helped power the United States for generations by working in coal mines and have now watched over a dozen coal plants go bankrupt since 2017. These coal communities also feel targeted by climate rhetoric. Current climate policies need to be inclusive of these families.

• The closure of coal plants and mines creates acute impacts on remote isolated communities compared to their metropolitan counterparts. There is a need to plan for the loss of employment and tax revenue, adequate decommissioning, and environmental remediation in these rural communities.

• Today, there is an immediate need for a national policy task force; a federal corporation to deliver dedicated financing sources for transitions out of coal; and equitable outcomes and forward-looking planning at the local level.

• Apsaalooke county is dealing with several infrastructure challenges; coal plant closures and COVID-19 have only exacerbated those problems. When coal energy declined due to natural gas and mines closed, 1,000 tribe members lost their jobs.

• There are a number of benefits to using cross-laminated timber (CLT). Wood is a carbon sink as long as the wood stays intact (40-50 percent of wood, by mass, is carbon). CLT is also a good insulator, it is fire resistant, its elasticity makes it a good material to use in a seismic zone, and it has a high weight to strength ratio.

• Mass timber provides workforce benefits across the entire supply chain: forestry, manufacturing, architecture and engineering, construction, and installation. There are an estimated 775,000 jobs and $46 billion tied to industry.

• WoodWorks focuses on growing the mass timber market by educating the industry’s “specifiers” (i.e., architects, engineers, developers) who determine which wood to use for a project.

• Freres Lumber has developed a patented product, Mass Plywood Panel, which has resulted in a $40-million investment into the community. The Beachie Creek Fire in Oregon has forced the company’s facilities to temporarily shut down due to poor air quality and the displacement of their workforce.

• Sterling Solutions produces TerraLam cross-laminated timber (CLT) mats. The company caters to the energy infrastructure space such as pipelines, power lines, and renewable energy, particularly solar farms and wind farms.

• In 2018, 2.3 million Americans were employed in energy efficiency. It was the largest and fastest growing sector in energy with a 7.8 percent growth rate in 2019. That same year, 79 percent of energy efficiency companies were small businesses with less than 20 employees. Energy efficiency jobs are available in both urban and rural areas.

• There are large potential global markets for tidal and river-based power. Research shows that hydrokinetic energy can provide power to 100 million people in the United States. Marine and hydrokinetic energy are often claimed to have high costs, but wind and solar costs were also expensive and have dropped greatly over time.

• Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) grants from federal agencies are specifically designed for U.S. small for-profit businesses with fewer than 500 employees that can develop products furthering the research agendas of federal agencies. SBIR funding can help communities build climate resilience and has broad benefits.

• COVID-19 has significantly impacted small businesses. The energy efficiency industry alone has lost 345,000 jobs, nearly 15 percent of all employees.