It could be solar, it could be wind. It could be green roofs or clean streets. Whatever the mechanism for greening the built environment, there is one force that drives environmental justice activist Charles Callaway: community. The director of workforce development at New York City nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice says he’s the “product” of a settlement house where “people believe in each other.” Callaway has worked on multiple campaigns for a more sustainable and healthy built environment since joining WE ACT in 2007. One of Callaway’s most innovative contributions to his community is helping a small group of WE ACT workforce graduates create a worker-owned cooperative called S.U.N.S., Solar Uptown Now Services. A year before co-founding S.U.N.S in 2019, Callaway’s frustration with the solar industry’s low-wage, temporary positions for newly trained installers came to a head, prompting him to help 11 WE ACT grads start a solar installation business. He believes it is the first exclusively minority worker-owned solar company in the New York City metropolitan area. Since its founding, the co-op, along with supplemental labor from WE ACT’s workforce program, has installed 18 MW of solar panels in the region. “You have to start at the beginning,” he says. “We can’t wait until someone figures it out for us.”

Callaway’s first concrete understanding of environmental injustice came in the 1990s when he and his father ran a food stand in Riverbank State Park in Manhattan, which was built on top of a sewage treatment plant. “I knew that I was on top of an unwanted facility in that community.”