Solar Industry Trainees Install Money-Saving Panels on Two Petworth Homes

An inner city Detroit program places 90 percent of graduates in well-paying tech jobs by teaching them how to code. It may serve as a viable path for Philadelphia citizens, as well.

The impoverished communities in Paris had high unemployment for adults and youth. The French government has offered financial incentives to hire people from the banlieues. Talents de Cités, a governmental program, offers cash prizes to young entrepreneurs.

The USA has one of the highest rates of incarceration, and reoffending is a likely outcome after prison. 'The Last Mile' and similar programs are providing inmates with the opportunity to learn marketable skills and earn degrees while in prison, and then find jobs once their sentence is finished, in order to decrease the likelihood of reoffending.

Across the world, TreeSisters is partnering with local organizations to help reforestation efforts. The nonprofit is centered on bolstering local, community-based, and usually women-led initiatives in countries like Kenya and Madagascar. The organization cites the fact that women are most often the ones interacting with the environment, and so raising awareness and taking action in such a gendered way can leverage the most impact.

At both the individual and corporate levels, action is being taken to eliminate the use of plastics. While many people have turned their attention to decreasing their own use of single-use plastics, many say that’s not enough. Instead, corporations bear the responsibility in creating and managing large-scale systems that eliminate the high use of non-reusable plastics.

The Chicago Tool Library allows members to borrow a wide variety of tools through a pay-what-you-want-membership model.

Inside Safe addresses the significant homelessness crisis in the city by traveling to encampments and offering people hotel rooms to stay in where they are connected with permanent housing and other necessary resources, like mental health care. Hotel rooms provide people with a safe space to heal and rest while working with a case worker to find housing. The initiative has so far moved 1,373 people into hotel rooms and 77 of them have moved into permanent housing.

Now Teach helps retrain older professionals for second careers in teaching, tapping candidates who might otherwise retire early to help fill staffing shortages in the education sector. The program has helped roughly 850 people earn a postgraduate certificate in education, and its trainees are more ethnically diverse than the national pool of teachers overall.

The 548 Foundation partnered with the Illinois government to create 1,000 solar jobs in the South and West side neighborhoods of Chicago through its 13-week training course. The training starts with life skills and works up to technical knowledge and panel installation. Then, the foundation connects graduates to employers with open jobs and continues to provide them with wraparound support.

To address shade inequality and rising heat deaths, the American Forests launched a digital tool in 2021 that scores geographic areas based on tree canopy and surface temperature, as well as other factors such as income, employment, race, age and health. It then calculates a Tree Equity Score and maps out the regions that have the greatest need for trees. With this information, Tucson aims to plant one million trees by 2030, and has already planted 120,000 over the past four years.