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.

​Every year, I am grateful that Martin Luther King’s birthday is in January because it provides new resolve for our essential cause of social justice.  This year we need to start with his inspiration more than most other Januarys: 

With the unassured future of our democracy everything we do in our own communities is important now.  In poor neighborhoods, we have a greater urgency for sources of strength to rebuild hope. Women and people of color must stand up now and not sit back down again until we know that our children will not be molested or shot at, our water will always be drinkable and we are truly free to be dignified.  We must find the thing that hurts the person standing next to us and ask them, “How can I ease your pain?”

We must fight for each other’s dignity as well as our own.  Injustice prescribes women’s roles to labor in the “service sector” only.  We must open the windows of light from all directions so that school girls who imagine themselves flying planes or running countries can take a hand up from women before them.   

This year demands a goal beyond the complacency of living wage jobs “granted” by stock holders in company boardrooms.  We must strive to bring more women into our vision of owning the businesses that produce our jobs. The women’s cooperative of the Old Window Workshop welcomes you to join us!  

Just as women from all over the world took the survival of democracy into our own hands on Saturday, the 21st, we will ORGANIZE and MARCH ON!

Four women stood in the dim parking lot of the After-Incarceration Support Services program on a bitter-cold Wednesday night sharing a cigarette. I made my way past them inside where I headed toward the sound of laughter and loud voices. Women were gathering in a big room at the end of a hall. I walked in to a room with many tables surrounded by chairs in the center and chairs along the walls which began to fill. Some women seemed to be young while others seemed older, although not nearly my age. It wasn’t apparent if there were more white or black or Latina women. It wasn’t apparent if they knew each other before this night. What was clear to me is that they were all invested in being there.

I came to talk about careers for women in construction trades. My paid part-time job since July has been to direct a building trades pre-apprenticeship program called Community Works. Gradually, the room filled to capacity. I guessed there were more than 30 women present. I wrote a statement on a blank page of an easel that I found in the corner of the room. “Women deserve good pay for their work.” My thought was that everyone in the room could identify with that, even if they hadn’t thought about a career in construction.

When I asked how many women had experience in the trades or even doing home repairs, there was great commotion with many hands up and several women talking at once about what they’ve done—some joking about themselves, others dead serious. One woman is a self-employed painter. “Not enough work, though,” she said. Another woman mixed concrete all last summer. After giving a brief introduction to Community Works, I asked how many women in the room had a GED or high school diploma. Less than a third of the women raised their hands. I asked how many had a driver’s license. Only seven women raised their hands. A young woman proudly raised her hand for the GED but her face fell at the second question. I saw a few heads nod when she told me that she had to pay $1,500 in fines and didn’t see how that was going to happen with no job.

Without a high school diploma, the chances of women getting a living-wage job are nil. Without some money to start with, the chances are few that women will go back to school while they care for children or old relatives and everybody they know lives in distressed neighborhoods with no place to park a car even if they could afford one. At least there is a gathering every Wednesday night at AISS where women have hope that their futures will be better than their past.

Just how is this going to happen? How are their futures going to be any better? Incarceration for women is a predictive outcome of poverty and, or sexual violence.

The immediate and solvable problem is poverty. Poverty is solved with dignified work for decent pay. The solution and the money to pay for the work, is within walking distance of the room at AISS. Preserving and maintaining historic buildings and parks creates long-term, skill-building jobs for the people who need them most. Every window restored is a week’s food for a family and then is something beautiful for generations. I will carry the hope of these women as their scout to open the road that runs between city hall and real jobs.

I want this blog to be useful to people who create jobs that build opportunities starting at the bottom rung of our economic system.  It is here that good jobs can create a more sustainable environment and simultaneously, a more just economy.

This letter is one that I wrote to thank the people who have supported me and the idea of Old Windows New Jobs during this first four years. 

Dear Ann, Ken, Rexene and Melinda, Jade Mortimer, Karen Ribeiro, Karen N., Jack G. and Fred Rose:

First of all, Happy 2013!  I hope your holidays were filled with joy, satisfying food and blessings deeply shared with family.

A new year is a good thing.  We all begin these with hope and determination—at least I do.  I feel wiser at the beginning of a new year than I do in the middle of it.  A new year is good for gleaning nuggets of wisdom based on things I tried to do the year, or years before.  January and February are like standing on a peak.  Everything is clear and the views are long.  I can see the path we’ve been walking on and I can see the next peak ahead although the terrain is not visible.

For me, the path we’ve shared started out in November of 2008 when, with the help of architect, Carole Vincze, I presented a paper at the International Greenbuild Conference in Boston, called “Global Warming and the Concentration of Poverty.”   7,000 people attended the conference.  Standing in front of 150 awake people from all over the country at 8:00 in the morning was terrifying.  The response I got during the Q & A was a turning point for me after years in construction.

You all, my trusted advisors, are the connection between heart and action. Jade, you introduced me to the integrity of natural materials and work by hand.  In my mind you set the standard for faithful historic preservation of windows.  When I began to think about the Roosevelt CCC idea that jobs could save the environment and decrease people’s suffering from poverty, Melinda Pellerin-Duck encouraged me first by connecting job training for inner-city women. Thank you for letting me know that educational institutions could be called upon.  Ann Lentini, my mentor, picked up, as you always do, when a good idea seems to be faultering for lack of know-how.  Thank you for leading the first public grant and recognition in Westfield.  Karen Ribeiro, you provided the impetus for the idea as a viable business prospect for women.  Thank you for making it real. Ken White, you perceived it and acted quickly in tangible ways to support the vision and helped me realize the idea for job creation had real currency.  Thank you for believing in it.  Rexene Picard, thank you for seeing the potential for creating jobs and for lending your workforce development perspective to those initial organizational efforts.  Karen N., you provided the example of re-purposing and heritage crafts as contemporary livelihood.  Thank you for cranking out the financials for Common Capital.  Jack, I thank you for your artist’s keen vision, your craftsman’s practicality and your critical insights.  Fred, thank you for telling me that I had a good story.  The concept of job creation as political action is empowering.

Some great things have happened since 2009.  Karen Ribeiro, her husband, Paul, Karen and Jack drew the outline of a production operation at the Westfield Energy Efficiency Trades Center.  When Sullivan Transportation needed their space back, I was prepared to relocate to a workshop space in Springfield in the heart of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the country—also rich in workforce history.

During the past two years, I’ve been inspired by women who fight daily to claim their place in a harsh economy.  {Women} have taught me that the idea of self-employment or cooperative worker-ownership is all well and good, but if there is no regular and adequate income, there is nothing.  The Trades Center first and then the Old Window Workshop have been a gift to introduce me to these great women.  I’m lucky to have had a year working with my hands and simple tools, with the heartwood of very old trees and with reflections of light surprising me from mouth-blown glass.

Every year flashes another beam of light on the path ahead. I feel like we have seen the child, the adolescent and now the young adult of this seed I think of as “old-windows-for-a-just-economy.”   Maturity will come when decision-makers see old buildings in “gateway cities” as a deep reservoir of natural resources to create jobs, save energy and save the planet by reducing, re-using and recycling.  We need to rely on what already exists, not create new things that cannot be repaired.  Economically, the goal of manufacturing is to “increase worker-productivity,” in other words, reduce labor costs.  Economically, the goal of preservation is to rely solely on labor.  We already have the materials.

Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you for sharing this with me.  I am forever indebted to you.

I would like to dedicate my next blog post to you using this letter.