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.  

Can you participate to help organize the Springfield Day Without Women March, a march for for women’s lives on March 8th, International Women's Day?  

Our first Organizer's meeting is Thursday, March 2nd, 11:00 AM at 806 Main St. Springfield (office of South End C-3 Community Center)

If each of us could help:

• Spread the word - DOWNLOAD Flyer  (post wherever you can)
• Provide cardboard and markers to help women make signs of things they want to say
• Be a Speaker about how we can protect ourselves, girls, people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants and our health and our water and our trees and gardens or what we need right now in our neighborhoods
• Lead the march with songs and drumming
• Sing or play music at the pre-march rally
• Provide a loud speaker system
• Serve as peacekeepers and safety guides—maybe wear white shirts or scarves.  This group should meet before the march.
• Take steps to make sure the march on March 8th is a good experience for women and children learning to speak out.

Join and SHARE our Facebook Event and please invite your friends.

The event will be 3:00 - 6:00 PM, giving us time for speakers, music and marching. Tell us your thoughts. Thanks so much.
In Solidarity with All Women, in Springfield and everywhere across the world.

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!

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.