Matt Ortega

Van Jones, founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and co-founder with James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org, was profiled in the Oakland Tribune.

The Oakland program took off after Jones, a 39-year-old Yale educated lawyer, worked with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to win passage of the federal Green Jobs Act, which provides funding for “green collar” jobs.

“In the last century, we could pretend that our energy policy, human rights policy, environmental policy and social policy were all separate,” he said. “In the new century, we have to recognize that it is all interrelated.”

A lean, soft-spoken man who stands 6-foot-1, Jones has a studious face, sporting wire-framed glasses, a mustache and goatee. But when he speaks, his message is anything but soft: The only way to eradicate poverty is to create honest, dignified employment for disadvantaged people, he said. [...]

“I feel that I am being recognized for uniting civil rights and ecological movements,” he said. “Someday everyone will shout, ‘green jobs, not jails!’ just like we used to sing, ‘We shall overcome.’”

Read the full profile on a true pioneer and leader as well as an icon of Oakland activism. Read up on his latest at the Huffington Post.