"The Mission of Verde is to improve the economic health of disadvantaged communities by creating environmental job training, employment, and entrepreneurial opportunities, fostering the connection between economic vitality and environmental protection and restoration."

Alan Hippolito
Executive Director
www.verdenw.org
Lives in Woodstock

Who inspired your view of environmentalism and community?
Verde started as a part of another organization, an affordable housing department in NE Portland. While I worked there we created a sustainable development program appropriate for residents of the housing. We did that for two reasons: because the sustainable development community wasn’t connecting with the community on a daily basis, and the groups that were creating jobs with the community weren’t engaging sustainability.

The short story is we started with a one page list of opportunities with EcoTrust, ShoreBank, Portland Office of Sustainable Development, Latino Network and Mercy Corp. Our whole goal was through this group to identify a business opportunity that made sense, with good demand, low capital need, accessible training, and was connected to what the comm. was already doing. After quite a period of time we identified a native plant nursery that would provide labor and plant material for storm water management, stream restoration.
Our business plan in 2004 got some early important grants from Enterprise, Spirit Mountain and Paul Allen. In late 2005 we spun off from Hacienda to make Verde.

What inspires you to keep going?
I think whenever you have a group of people and you’re creating something out of nothing, so every time you get a little more excited and you think we must be on some kind of right track. It’s a well thought out, not incredibly novel, we just picked pieces of what other people were working on and put them together. I think the community deserves really good ideas. There’s positive motivation in that it’s exciting to see someone who is intimidated by math and never used a calculator scratching their head and using an architect ruler to figure out where to put a planting.

There’s a less than positive motivation in that I don’t think this sustainable economy should be growing without us, particularly for an group founded on environment, economy and equity. People are thinking they’ll deal with the equity later, so we come to the movement and say, that’s all good but we need some jobs in our community. For example, how are we going to pay attention to green building and get people those jobs. The environmental and economic expertise races ahead and the community is like, wait, that belongs to us.

Are there other groups like this?
There are lots of groups that do that whole social entrepreneurship thing, but on the notion of trying to connect disadvantaged communities to environmental sustainability, there’s four or five.

Why native plants?
Starting with the list of opportunities from folks within sustainability, we whittled through and the notion of a nursery and a restoration program started to bubble to the top. We’ve gone from basically nothing to being able to provide services throughout Bybee Lake and Crystal Springs, maintain storm water management for city, and fall of 2007 create our first small scale product of native plant material. It’s going to be our first greenhouse, so it will be pretty small, and these will be plants we use on our projects. It will set the stage for us to move in a few years to a larger greenhouse and outdoor acre production.

How are people selected for program?
We provide training for people while we employ them; if they’re a regular employee they get benefits. They learn by doing and by classroom learning. If we have new openings we’ll bring in new people and they will also participate in our training. We can tell people that this job can be there for them in a year. We’re trying to meet people’s economic needs. The first two people we hired in November 2005 are still with us; we’ve added three other employees since then. I think it’s a good gig-- you have an employer who will provide classroom training and will pay for the class if they want to go to PCC and also pay the hourly wage. It’s a horizontal organization, one of our goals is to give our employees the tools they need to operate this business and move on to operate their own or move into the private sector. Power is distributed, so everyone gets to participate in what the company wants to do, what we’re going to do if we meet our targets. They’re all immigrants: some are long time residents, some come from a labor background of construction, or maintenance or working in a McDonald’s.

I’m an environmental lawyer by training, and when I first finished law school most of the work I did was traditional environmental justice stuff, minimizing exposures to lead or contaminated land. Because of that I had a lot of strong relationships and background in the environmental community. There are lots of people like this working 60-70 hours a week. At the same time saw that communities like this one weren’t participating in that at all. A lot of my work that I’ve done in environmental justice was how much folks in communities like this really just need good jobs. The best way to be of service is to find ways to connect communities to those jobs and opportunities that they are currently excluded from. If you want to serve a community, you’ve got to figure out what they need.

What do you envision things will be like in 5 years? In 10?
I think the train is on the track, it’s on its way. Part of our assumption was that they were going to make the marketplace. It’s about who gets to participate in the marketplace as it ebbs and flows.