Green Jobs For Disadvantaged Youth

TEHAPACHI, CA - SEPTEMBER 11: Under the desert's heat, Cullen Curarelli, a recently laid-off Ohio plumber enrolled in the Cerro Coso Community College Wind Turbine Technician Class, here he performs his maiden climb on a wind turbine, on September 11, 2009 in Tehapachi, California. Curarelli packed his car and drove to California after seeing a story about the college's green jobs classes on his local news. The students, often laid off auto workers or contruction workers from different states, have enrolled in the Cerro Cose community College Wind Turbine Technician Class hoping to be a part of the new green economy. The concept of green job programs was invented by Van Jones (who until recently was the White House's green jobs adviser) at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, one of the U.S. most violent city, with high levels of pollution, poverty and unemployement. The green jobs programs goal is to prepare inner city inhabitants (where jobs prospects are few) or recently laid off workers to compete for the estimated hundred of thousands green jobs that will be created in the next ten years. (Photo Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images)