Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Mission and Vision

Reclaim the Future creates opportunities in the green economy for low-income people and people of color. Part social enterprise, part think-tank, and part grassroots advocate, Reclaim the Future's mission is to help build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

The path to peaceful streets and true community safety is not more prisons, but ecologically sound economic development. Reclaim the Future helps forge public/private/community partnerships to promote healthy communities. We envision eco-industrial parks on land once blighted by brownfields and prisons. We envision non-profit "Solution Centers" training young urban workers in new technologies. We imagine kids who are now fodder for prisons, instead creating zero-pollution products, healing the land, and harvesting the sun. We believe America's blue-collar cities — like Oakland, Watts, Detroit and Newark — can bloom into vibrant green-collar economic centers. We're building a pathway from the present "gulag" economy to the future "green economy". We want to move urban America from jail cells to solar cells.

Here are some of the ways that Reclaim the Future campaign is doing just that:

• Pilot Projects
• Teaching Tools
• Green Jobs Policy
• The Green Wave

Our Approach

Reclaim the Future weds two powerful, emerging ideas:

• "Restorative justice": a cost-effective criminal justice approach that is based on reconciliation, restoration, healing and rehabilitation.
• "Restorative economics": an ecologically responsible approach to economic development, promoting practices that heal the natural environment rather than despoiling it.

Taken together, these ideas create a powerful new framework for advancing a fundamentally new, solution-oriented, vision-driven politics of urban coalition building.

Short term, we are working to create green-collar jobs in Oakland. Green-collar jobs are good, living wage jobs in enterprises and industries that are environmentally positive (for example, renewable energy, alternative fuels, and green construction). We believe Oakland can become an inspiring model for the rest of the nation. Oakland can be, and should be, a shining example of a town transforming itself from blue-collar to green-collar.

Long term our goal is to help create state and federal "Green Workforce Development Acts," ensuring "Silicon Valleys of green capital" in struggling communities nationwide.

Make a charitable contribution to Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.