As we near our milestone of 10 tons of reusable wood and glass saved from landfills, women of the Old Window Workshop are celebrating our skills, knowing that our work can save our environment while we provide for our families.   

And this is our challenge:  Educate all who would replace our environment with concrete, fake wood, shiny vinyl and triple plate glass that the true energy savings is in preserving and re-using what already exists.   

This is our calling:  “As we work for a more sustainable environment, we will create a more just economy.”

Now, please take time to read the article in YES Magazine by Penn Loh about the new economy of cooperation and watch the “Real to Reel” TV coverage of the OId Window Workshop.

Old Window Workshop has six suggestions for Springfield to increase opportunities  for residents and save its historic heart. 

1. Offer low-interest loans for window restoration: Cooperative Banks and Community Development Block Grant funds could offer low-interest loans to low-income homeowners to restore and retrofit windows for energy efficiency.  Pre-approved loans are a common tool used by salesmen of new replacement windows. Some homeowners have spent many thousands of dollars unnecessarily simply because they could get a loan to replace their windows. Loans to re-use windows have triple-value:  improved living conditions for homeowners and tenants, jobs and skill-building for workers, quality windows and energy improvements for property-owners.   

2. Educate Homeowners: An Information Sheet comparing replacement windows to restored windows could be available at the Building Inspector’s Office when property owners apply for permits to replace their windows.

3. Offer Window Restoration vs. Replacement: Property managers and owners could be required to get window restoration bids along with their application to replace windows.  Building Permits could require an estimate of the cost of replacing demolished windows, as well as reusable doors, interior trim and flooring. 

4. Expand Job Training: Remodeling and restoration contracts for city properties could require job training for no less than 2 Springfield women or youth.

5. Create Higher Ed Opportunities: The City Council should request that STCC and UMass create a Historic Preservation and Restoration Trades Institute where students earn income and gain skills on-the-job while taking courses that lead to Associates Degrees and higher education.

6. Set The Example: Soon Springfield City Hall will need windows maintained, re-glazed and re-finished.  This cost can be incorporated into the city’s monthly building maintenance budget.  At-risk youth could be trained and paid in the summer or after-school during the year, on the condition that they complete high school.  Women could job-share and stay in school.  

The Mass DEP has issued a request for comment on the Construction and Demolition Best Management Practices Guidelines.  

We have responded this way:
Our goal is to create jobs and prevent the indiscriminate demolition and disposal of wooden architectural components on buildings where public funds contribute to the overall project.

We recommend that the Mass DEP C&D Best Practices include a 90-day public review and comment period on all demolition contracts in order to create jobs through material reuse.
Money spent by the State Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) is sadly paying for trucking large quantities of original materials out-of-state for incineration or landfills. In contrast, cities all over the country are witnessing job opportunities created through the building materials reuse industry.

One example of opportunity lost is the Springfield Technical Community College campus where thousands of taxpayer dollars left the city in dumpsters without creating one lasting job.

To prevent further demolition of wooden components, please consider the following points:

1. Preserving buildings through centuries has been one of the contributions of skilled labor to civilization.  And the knowledge of preservation craft passed down over generations instilled the population with the resilience needed to rebuild after wars, depressions, floods and tornadoes. Women developed these skills as well as men.
2. All that remains of the original forests of New England are old growth trees that were incorporated into buildings.  Structural posts and beams, windows, doors, trim and columns were hand-crafted from wood that grew on this land as many as four hundred years ago.  That is why the original Springfield Armory windows still have structural integrity after nearly two centuries of exposure to weather.  Unlike PVC, wood can be repaired, maintained and repurposed for generations.  
3. Our government spends millions of dollars trucking and disposing of historic wood instead of seeding economic opportunity that is environmentally sustainable. 
4. The Springfield National Armory once employed a labor force of 14,000 workers.  The city became known as “The City of Homes.” The black middle class came into prominence here because of more equal access to skilled jobs and managerial positions at the Armory.  But since the 1968 conversion of the Armory from a military to civilian purpose, the interrelationship of the Armory to the people of Springfield has been severed.  The State Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, which today controls all buildings of the former Armory, offers no connection to the once great, indigenous workforce. Neighborhoods surrounding the Armory are left to disintegrate by poverty and joblessness.
5. New livelihoods can be created in preserving materials.  Worker-owned businesses in lead and asbestos abatement can increase competition in this specialty where historic buildings are an endless resource of jobs.  Skilled crafts in preservation and reuse of original materials can re-build the local workforce and teenagers can get real work experience.  In this way inner city residents can regain a sense of place and being part of history through generations of economic and social connection to their environment. For example:  every restored window puts food on a worker’s table for a week.  But that same worker only gets paid half-an-hour to destroy an old window and another half-hour to install a new one from far away.  

This practice of wasting our natural resources and our money through thoughtless demolition must stop.  We call upon Mass DEP and DCAMM to include in Best Management Practices a 90-day public review on all demolition contracts in order to create jobs through material reuse.  Use the Building Materials Reuse Association (bmra.org) for examples of city ordinances from all over the country that are being used to realize the value of repurposed and preserved materials.

After the election, I had the good fortune to meet and work with activists for environmental and social justice.  First, I attended a panel discussion of historic preservationists led by UMass professors, Max Page and Marla Miller.  These folks are redefining the future of preservation as a tool to fight climate change and inequality.  The second was the Board of Directors of the Building Materials Reuse Association who met in Chicago.  This Board is a group of tool belt entrepreneurs, architects and organizers who reuse original materials from buildings and give it back to residents who reclaim their own whole communities.  

I heard Max Page say, “We can’t build our way out of climate disaster, we have to preserve our way out of it.”  And Anne Nicklin, CEO of the BMRA often calls us to envision and act to create a “world without waste.”  That means no more throwaways of our great natural resources, including us people.  

​Ahead of us is the fair distribution of good wages and family-centered, community-focused work where women are equal in all fields.  Ahead of us is saving our own local environments by stopping leaks in existing gas lines—not building new ones.  Ahead of us is re-learning what democracy should look like---not giving our power over to bloated billionaires.  

With your eyes open every one of us can recognize that women are missing from corporation board rooms, on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and on construction sites.  In fact, where people are making the most money in our economy, women are an unusual sight. And every one who takes their child to day care or visits a nursing home can recognize that men are absent in these jobs.

Not just friends that I talk to, but strangers in the grocery line agree that our country is on the precipice of changing this basic inequality. A just economy is one which is more women-centered.  It is where our economic well-being is structured around the health and safety of families and neighborhoods. To be more women-centered is to create job opportunities that put families first and focus on the places we call home.

Springfield is one of the richest grounds for us to create more gender and racial economic equality. Women and people of color can grow this city by reusing Springfield’s wealth of raw materials and restoring our built environment. Restoring infrastructure, like water pipes, underground gas lines, transportation systems, healthy buildings and outdoor spaces is place-based work and is therefore accessible to women. 

This year, the U.S. Department of Labor began a full-out effort to build Registered Apprenticeship programs as a means for low-opportunity citizens to gain access to dignified, living-wage work. Massachusetts can help grow a more equitable workforce by engaging community colleges in utilizing existing resources through preservation, material reuse and environmental health and safety industries that are inherently more women-centered than exclusive high-tech and construction fields. From this ground, women can bridge the gap between family and equal work.  

Jenny Cavanaugh completed her Master’s Degree in Design and Historic Preservation at UMass by giving us her research and conclusions linking existing resources to women’s economic opportunity.  Her Capstone Project featured OWW to illustrate the connection between women in the trades and Springfield’s legacy of buildings which sheltered and grew generations of the city’s workforce. Read her study. She calls upon STCC and DCAMM to open possibilities with resources already in hand.