I spent two days this past week in Boston in a planning retreat with the Emerald Cities Collaborative (ECC). The Corps Network is proud to be involved in the ECC, a group made up of national leaders in the arenas of urban sustainability, social justice, labor standards, housing development, community organizing, and workforce development. Our common goal:

Green America's cities in "high-road" ways that advance fair opportunity, shared wealth, and democracy within them.

The ECC was founded in November 2008 by MIT DUSP Professor J. Phillip Thompson, COWS director Joel Rogers, and SEIU Executive Vice President Gerry Hudson. National partners include: the Building and Construction Trades Department (AFL-CIO), Center for Community Change, Change to Win, Community Action Partnership, The Corps Network, COWS, Enterprise Community Partners, Green for All, LISC, LIUNA, MIT CoLab, NAACP, NeighborWorks, Partnership for Working Families, PolicyLink, and YouthBuild USA.

According to our stated goals: "ECC's first project is to comprehensively retrofit all of America's urban building stock. Recognizing that market-driven models of green retrofits will likely pass over low-income neighborhoods, weaken labor standards, and threaten quality of work, ECC proposes an alternative energy-efficiency model to be implemented city by city, maximizing gains from shared learning and mutual assistance. ECC plans on launching city-scale building retrofit and inclusive green job training programs in roughly a dozen cities over the next two years."

The Corps Network role in this partnership is to facilitate involvement in the community; we're the community part of this community-based collaboration. Where it is appropriate (and we can see many areas where it will be!), Corps throughout the country will be included. I'm very excited about the opportunities this Collaborative will bring to The Corps Network and to Corps.