It can be solar, it can be wind. It could be green roofs or clean streets. Whatever the mechanism for greening the built environment, there’s one force driving environmental justice activist Charles Callaway: community. The director of workforce development for the New York City nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice says it’s the “product” of a settlement house where “people believe in one another. ‘other”. Callaway has worked on several campaigns for a more sustainable and healthy built environment since joining WE ACT in 2007. One of Callaway’s most innovative contributions to its community is helping a small group of graduates from the WE ACT’s work to create a worker-owned cooperative called SUNS, Solar. Services Uptown Now. A year before co-founding SUNS in 2019, Callaway’s frustration with the solar industry’s low wages and temporary positions for newly trained installers came to a head, prompting him to help 11 graduates of WE ACT to start a solar installation business. It is believed to be the first solar company solely owned by minority workers in the New York City metropolitan area. Since its founding, the cooperative, along with complementary labor from WE ACT’s labor program, has installed 18 MW of solar panels in the region. “You have to start at the beginning,” he says. “We can’t wait until someone solves it for us.”
Callaway’s first concrete understanding of environmental injustice came in the 1990s when he and his father ran a food stand at Riverbank State Park in Manhattan, which was built on top of a sewage treatment plant. “I knew I was on top of an unwanted facility in this community.”
Today, his leadership is perhaps most evident through WE ACT’s green workforce program, the Green Institute. Callaway says people affected by environmental ills should reap the benefits of a green economy, including good-paying, sustainable jobs. Otherwise, “what’s the point?” he asks
WE ACT’s Green Institute has trained more than 800 unemployed or underemployed Northern Manhattan residents for careers in the construction industry. Students earn certificates in OSHA, Energy Efficiency, Solar PV Installation, Asbestos Removal, and Signage and Scaffolding. Of the Green Institute’s four focus areas (solar, offshore wind, electric vehicles and building electrification), solar is where they’ve made progress, Callaway says, with the rest on the horizon. Since 2016, he has worked with the nonprofit Solar One and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board to organize a group of low-income co-op homebuyers that would make it possible to purchase affordable rooftop solar systems. His leadership included grassroots efforts such as driving around Harlem to post flyers and hold workshops. Callaway would “energize the whole room about how we can use solar power to make Harlem a leader in the transition to clean energy,” says Anika Wistar-Jones, director of Solar One’s Affordable Solar Program.
Callaway is “relentlessly committed to its team of workers and owners and making sure they get paid well to do a good job,” says Wistar-Jones. “Where other people may bemoan the lack of good job opportunities for apprentices in the workforce, Charles sees the problem and thinks, ‘What needs to happen for this to change?’
Callaway hopes the worker solar cooperative will become a fully sustainable business and complete solar projects in neighborhoods that need it most. “Disadvantaged communities typically have the worst possible built environments,” he says. “Our goal is to create a backup of our own community.”
