Greater Bay Communities Clean Transportation Careers Project
Organization: West Oakland Job Resource Center (WOJRC)
Funding Request: $500,000.00
Project Summary
The Greater Bay Communities Clean Transportation Careers Project, led by WOJRC, aims to expand the definition of transportation equity through the experiences and priorities of disadvantaged communities in the Greater Bay Area, centering on access to the career pathways being created by California’s climate goals across the Clean Transportation Ecosystem and Supply Chain. Rather than focusing on vehicles or infrastructure, this project addresses the workforce dimension of the clean transportation transition, bridging environmental justice with economic justice through community empowerment and industry engagement. Its purpose is not merely to research challenges but to define and outline an action-oriented course to address them through research, planning, partnership-building, and piloting.
The work has two main strands. The first is research, planning, and development: engaging community members seeking to start or advance careers in the clean transportation supply chain to understand their needs and barriers (including a worker survey capturing lived experiences around job access, training, advancement, retention, and health and safety), and engaging local businesses to understand their workforce needs and build career pipelines. The second is a pilot “career concierge,” a model designed to engage both community members seeking high-quality, clean transportation manufacturing careers and supply-chain employers (especially small and medium-sized, locally owned businesses) seeking reliable, skilled workers. The concierge would provide tailored, culturally competent outreach, screening, training, and job referral for low- and moderate-income jobseekers, to connect at least 50 community members to living-wage jobs, while collaborating with employers on recruitment, retention, and advancement.
Project Descriptions and Transportation Equity
The challenges this project confronts are rooted in the disconnected nature of California’s employment training systems. First, despite growing awareness of zero-emission vehicles and clean mobility, most community residents remain effectively excluded from, or unaware of, equitable career pathways in the Clean Transportation Ecosystem, the wide array of careers tied to the operation, maintenance, and manufacturing of clean transportation. Second, employers often lack knowledge of or do not participate in workforce development. Third, training frequently does not yet exist for emerging industries such as ZEVs and must be developed. Together, these create a fractured workforce development system that hinders the communities the project serves, and CARB funding is positioned to help overcome all three while building something that outlives the grant.
The project reframes transportation equity to include economic opportunity, recognizing that the Bay Area’s leadership in clean transportation adoption has coincided with persistent affordability and access struggles for the workers essential to the regional economy. It works overwhelmingly with African American and Latino communities, who experience unemployment persistently above regional averages, and within those communities, it deliberately targets justice-involved people and those who are unhoused or housing-insecure, two groups systematically discriminated against in hiring or relegated to the lowest-wage jobs. By incorporating the lived experiences of justice-involved people alongside the needs of industry partners, the project aims to establish a job training model that prepares participants for the workplace and equips them to remain in the workforce and advance along career pathways, ensuring the clean transportation transition delivers family-sustaining opportunities to those typically left out.
Community Benefit
The project focuses on communities of color in the East and South Bay, tracing the Clean Transportation Ecosystem and Supply Chain from the Port of Oakland to Silicon Valley and centering the working-class populations along that corridor who have not benefited from the region’s booming economy. Primary beneficiaries are low- and moderate-income jobseekers from BIPOC and immigrant communities, with particular attention to justice-involved and housing-insecure residents. The benefit is direct and economic: the project incorporates community members into research design, curricula development, and the establishment of the career concierge, so these elements are responsive to priority-population needs, and the pilot aims to connect at least 50 community members to living-wage jobs in the clean transportation supply chain, increasing their incomes and economic empowerment.
Engagement is structured to intentionally involve residents often excluded from planning and decision-making, building on 75 in-depth interviews with production workers conducted last year, which used culturally competent outreach in four languages and $100 incentives to recognize participants’ time. As planning continues, representatives of workers from marginalized communities will help define their own career needs and goals and shape pilots grounded in principles of job quality, equity, and worker voice. The career concierge will offer training, an industry-focused job referral platform, and ongoing support, with counseling staff assessing job seekers’ readiness for high-road jobs and connecting them to openings or training opportunities. Capacity-building runs throughout, increasing community understanding of clean transportation careers and laying the groundwork for a more responsive regional workforce system.
Partnerships and Structure
The partnership is intentionally designed to center the leadership of low-wage workers from BIPOC, immigrant, and other under-invested communities, formalized through its structure and supplemented by engagement with community, worker, and environmental justice organizations that may not formally partner but whose participation keeps the work grounded in community and worker needs. The roles are organized as follows:
WOJRC (Lead Applicant / Project Coordinator): Establishes the project’s Advisory Committee and subcommittees, organizes meetings, develops the research plan, completes reporting, and provides back-end financial support, including invoicing, budget monitoring, and fiscal reporting to CARB.
Port of Oakland (Central Advisor): Engages in the research process, assists with employer engagement, and helps coordinate across public agencies, drawing on its role receiving over $300 million from the EPA for zero-emissions infrastructure.
Working Partnerships USA (WPUSA): Active in research and design, conducting labor market research and focus groups, and taking the lead on standing up the Career Concierge in the second half of the funding period.
Machinists Institute (MI): Central to labor market research, focus groups, and data analysis, working to build a high-road ecosystem in advanced manufacturing and automotive/transportation repair trades.
UAW Center for Manufacturing a Green Economy: Conducts in-depth worker interviews to clarify the quality, accessibility, and structure of the clean transportation supply chain and its occupations.
Mercedes Rodriguez (Community Advisor): A core member of the Oakland community focused on tying large-scale development to community benefits, who recruits and coordinates community participants and keeps the research focused on community needs.
Equity is built into the structure by formalizing worker and community leadership in the partnership and by drawing on partners with long histories serving communities left out of the Bay Area economy. Where the combined collaboration is new, the grant supports its development, harnessing each partner’s established programs, staff, and data systems to lay the groundwork for a regional workforce system far more responsive to community members than those that currently exist.