In East Buffalo, New York, the median yearly income is just over $25,000. Two-thirds of the population lack a college degree, and the poverty rate is 39%. But after battery manufacturer Viridi moved into the old General Motors factory on Delavan Avenue in 2018, founder and CEO Jon Williams saw an opportunity.
Viridi made a $500,000 investment into a nonprofit called GreenForce, which trains East Buffalo residents in electronic proficiency and other battery manufacturing skills that help them assemble Viridi’s lithium-ion batteries. The nonprofit also helps Viridi’s more than 100 local employees with non-work related issues, like getting daycare, accessing transportation, acquiring adequate identification, and even raising money for employees amid family tragedies.
A fifth of Viridi’s current workforce was hired through GreenForce—which also gives equal opportunity to formerly incarcerated individuals.
Commitment issues: Williams told Tech Brew that working with GreenForce and embedding the manufacturing plant in East Buffalo wasn’t a philanthropic endeavor; it was an intentional business decision.
“If we can create economic opportunity for people that live in that neighborhood and they can walk to work, we’re going to have a more reliable workforce,” Williams said. “We’re going to have a more committed workforce, and we’re going to have a workforce that’s going to be less likely to jump to another job.”
Even so, Viridi and GreenForce have contributed philanthropically to the East Buffalo community. Pastor James Giles, who works as Viridi’s head of personnel, told Tech Brew that jobs at Viridi have given locals a “pathway to wealth,” allowing them to no longer live paycheck to paycheck.
“We’ve been neglected when it comes to economic opportunities,” Giles said of East Buffalo. “[Viridi presented] an opportunity for this community in a very huge way, in an impactful way, because it hasn’t been done before.”
Barriers to access: And the data shows that low-income, majority Black communities like East Buffalo don’t usually land competitive, high-paying clean energy jobs like those at Viridi, Professor Jeannette Wicks-Lim told Tech Brew.
Wicks-Lim researches labor economics and race at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and co-authored a paper on the jobs created by recent renewable energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing legislation (like the Inflation Reduction Act). The paper states that 59.7% of the jobs created by those laws are held by white workers—and only 9.7% of them are held by Black workers.
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Wicks-Lim said that such a discrepancy is due to structural racism.
“All the things that make it hard for a worker to either get access to or stay in a job relate to structural racism,” she said. “That’s why you keep on seeing this pattern of these higher-paying [clean energy] jobs being held by certain groups of workers more than marginalized groups of workers.”
New opportunities: Working at Viridi has been a unique opportunity for the employees who received their jobs through GreenForce training. Viridi employee Maurice Roberson told Tech Brew that his job as a battery assembler and team lead has turned his life “totally around.”
“I get to see new things in life I never experienced, especially coming from my background,” Roberson, who has worked at the company for nearly three years, said. “I know how to put the batteries together. I know how to read the machine. I know what to do if a battery gets hot, what to do to defuse the situation. I’ve learned a lot.”
GreenForce also supported Roberson outside of work: The nonprofit helped him to enroll at SUNY Erie Community College. With a college degree in business, Roberson can access a host of new job opportunities that he wouldn’t have been able to with just a high school diploma.
He told Tech Brew he’d like to keep working in the green economy—preferably at Viridi.
“As long as they let me stay here,” he said, “I’m gonna retire from here.”
But Viridi CEO Williams celebrates when Viridi employees hired through GreenForce get new, higher paying jobs, which he said has happened a handful of times.
“That’s what we want to happen,” Williams said. “We want people to realize as you acquire skills, it’s OK to bid yourself up.”