Nonprofit brownfields cleanup force gets $200,000 EPA grant
Landforce crews build urban hiking trails, cull invasive weeds, and work on other environmental restoration and maintenance projects, but their biggest job is clearing pathways out of poverty for themselves.
The Homewood-headquartered group got some help with that task Thursday when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it will receive about $200,000 over three years from the Environmental Workforce Development Brownfields Job Training program.
The federal program, established in 1998, provides funding to recruit, train and place individuals who are victims of generational poverty in full-time, sustainable, environmental jobs targeting restoration of abandoned former industrial sites known as “brownfields.”
Carlton Waterhouse, EPA deputy assistant administrator for land and emergency management, said the grant program provides opportunities for individuals to learn skills and graduate with a variety of certificates, while also reclaiming brownfields — work that can be “catalysts to spark economic revival in struggling communities.”
The Landforce grant is one of 18 awarded by the EPA nationwide in 2021. Also receiving job training grants in the EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region are the Energy Coordinating Agency in Philadelphia, which is getting about $183,000 to train 54 workers, and the West End Neighborhood House Inc. in Wilmington, Del., for 58 trainees.
Landforce executive director Ilyssa Manspeizer said the grant will support skills training and development for 38 people in a variety of environmental stewardship fields, including habitat restoration and landscaping, vacant lot improvements, tree planting, stormwater management, and green infrastructure installation and maintenance.
“For us to live in a just world, we need to invest not just in the environment but in all the people who inhabit it,” Ms. Manspeizer said.
The social enterprise nonprofit was established in 2015 to train individuals transitioning from public assistance, jail, addiction, mental health issues and poverty to work in urban greenspaces and brownfields.
The EPA money supplements revenue from Landforce’s project contracts, Ms. Manspeizer said, and is needed to cover nonpaying costs like career coaching and mental health programming.
“We wouldn’t be able to meet those needs without this support,” she said. “We’re turning people into taxpayers, so eventually this investment pays off very well.”
Ms. Manspeizer said surveys show 92% of previous participants in the training and work program get full-time jobs and 91% are still employed a year after leaving the program.
Landforce crews have previously done work in Mount Washington’s
Emerald View Park, where they built 10 miles of trails; Hazelwood Green, a riverfront park reclaimed from a coke and steel mill brownfield along the Monongahela River; a 3-mile trail construction in Bear Run Nature Reserve, Fayette County; the South Side Accessible Trail Loop; and various properties owned by the Allegheny Land Trust and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy.
Ms. Manspeizer said Landforce has previously done work at several brownfield sites and is discussing cleanup work at others that would include installation of green infrastructure. Green infrastructure includes bioswales, permeable pavement, and roof, rain and street gardens to reduce stormwater overflows into the region’s rivers.
Landforce is based on similar urban job training programs in Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., that have successfully trained unemployed or underemployed individuals for full-time stewardship, maintenance and public land improvement work that greens the urban environment.
Jasimine Cooper, director of workforce development at Landforce, said participants are trained in basic carpentry, blueprint reading, tool use and care, trail construction, green infrastructure maintenance, tree planting and invasive plant removal. Training is also offered for so-called soft skills, like job readiness, workplace behavior, work ethic development, first aid and CPR, trauma impacts, and mental health.
“As they go through the training sessions, they’re learning new skills and at the same time eliminating any barriers they have to full employment,” Ms. Cooper said during a break from interviewing applicants for this year’s crew.
The program has hired 100 people for its work crews during the past five years, provided more than 12,000 hours of training and done 40,000 hours of environmental stewardship work in the region.
Applications for this year’s work crew closed March 11, Ms. Cooper said, and seven weeks of training sessions will begin April 12. Work on community environmental projects will start in June and run through October. Participants are paid $10 an hour for a full 40-hour week during training and can earn up to $15 an hour for the seasonal work.
The EPA estimates that there are more than 450,000 brownfields in the U.S. Cleaning up and reinvesting in these properties increases local tax bases, facilitates job growth, limits sprawl, and both improves and protects the environment.
Since its beginning in 1998, Mr. Waterhouse said the program has awarded 335 grants and trained 18,541 workers, with 13,751, or 74%, of them finding fulltime employment.
“The program provides a chance to advance economic opportunities and advance environmental justice,” Mr. Waterhouse said, “while we clean up environmental problems.”