NewsProfiles in clean energy: Once incarcerated, expert moves students into climate-solution careers

Profiles in clean energy: Once incarcerated, expert moves students into climate-solution careers

PHILADELPHIA — Inside a converted warehouse in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods, students circle around Jackie Robinson as he quizzes them about a 1980s furnace. Although they’ll encounter older equipment like this, the program is cutting edge, aimed at training people to work on homes in ways that address climate change and make clean energy affordable.

More than 3.3 million people work in the clean energy industry and the number is growing fast. But Robinson, a building trades instructor, is concerned that’s not widely understood.

“A lot of low income people don’t even know these jobs exist … it’s all about getting the word out,” he said.

In addition to expanding an important workforce, solid career opportunities also reduce recidivism. Robinson’s own transition into the clean energy workforce and ultimately to this nonprofit, the Energy Coordinating Agency, came during his time in prison.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of an occasional series of personal stories from the energy transition — the change away from a fossil-fuel based world that largely causes climate change.

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He was locked up for 27 years on a drug trafficking conviction.

“I was a top student in school, no question. But then sometimes you think you’re slick and you fall in with the wrong people … and you’re thinking, ‘hey, it’s great money, easy money, but … there’s no good ending in it,’” he said.

His three young children were the motivation to use all that time inside to learn new skills so he could take care of them when he got out.

Robinson took courses in welding, carpentry, accounting, fashion merchandising and Arabic. “If it was a free class that educated me on something, I took it,” he said.

“They got the body, fine,” he said, referring to incarceration, and raising his hands to his eyes, “but I could go a lot of places in my mind.”

Johnson Controls, the international building equipment company, also offered classes inside the prison system. That’s where Robinson first got a look at the energy field and had the chance to work on refrigerators and heating and air conditioning equipment. Johnson Controls hired some people when they were released from prison, and Robinson was one.

After working there and at another organization that offered apprenticeship programs, Connection Training Services, he came to this equity-focused nonprofit housed in a sprawling warehouse in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. Where Civil War uniforms were once sewn, a life-size roof sits on the floor for students to practice installing solar panels, and mazes of walls display exposed piping.

With his keys jingling and cane gently tapping on wood floors, Robinson, 59, leads a group into a back classroom to study circuits. Above a window, painted on the wall, there is a quote by Benjamin Franklin that Robinson said is one of his favorites: “He who hath a trade,

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