The City of Richmond’s RichmondBUILD program was awarded a $500,000 Brownfields job training grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the EPA announced last week. The grant comes in addition to a $200,000 grant the EPA provided earlier this year for brownfields job training.
The grants aim to recruit, train, and place workers for community revitalization and cleanup projects at brownfield sites.
Individuals trained in the program “will gain skills to serve their own communities through local remediation of projects” and will earn up to seven industry certifications, including in Lead and asbestos abatement; hazardous waste operations and emergency response; mold remediation and environmental sampling and analysis, according to the EPA.
The program targets local residents who are unemployed, underemployed and/or face barriers to employment.
“Graduates of the EPA-RichmondBUILD programs have obtained careers in the environmental remediation field and great redevelopment jobs,” said Fred Lucero, RichmondBUILD Program Manager. “Through the USEPA funding, we have trained hundreds of Richmond residents changing our community one person at a time.”
In addition to RichmondBUILD, the EPA last week also announced $500,000 Brownfields job training grants to both Oakland-based Cypress Mandela Training Center, Inc. and Los Angeles Conservation Corps.
The funding is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), which invests more than $1.5 billion through the EPA’s brownfields program, the single-largest investment in national brownfields revitalization to date.
Learn more about the RichmondBUILD program here.
