Job seekers speak with representatives from several area businesses at the "Employment: Expanding Our Opportunities" job fair.

Toni Simmons believes in second chances. As a trainer for Goodwill’s Employability and Life Skills program at the Sarpy County Probation Center, Toni works to help people on probation find their place in the workforce. Participants work with Toni on life skills training, preparing resumes, mock interviews, and searching for jobs. After employment has been found, they continue to follow-up with her to assure the new job is going smoothly.

As another resource for her participants, Toni helped organize the “Employment: Expanding Our Opportunities” job fair on Wednesday, May 16.

She organized the event to be held at the probation center so she could observe the participants’ interactions with employers. Even if the participants didn’t land a job from Wednesday’s job fair, Toni can help them learn from the experience and continue to build job skills.

The job fair brought employers Sitel, Job Source USA, West, Hilton, Gallup and Creighton University. LaQuela Weathers, the “Coupon Queen,” offered advice on using coupons and checking store sales to save money. In just two hours, 71 job seekers made their way through the fair.

KETV stopped by and talked to a couple job seekers. Learn more about some of them at KETV.com.

Goodwill Industries and the Sarpy County Probation Office are hosting the “Employment: Expanding our Opportunities” job fair tomorrow — Wednesday, May 16, 2012. The event will be held at the Sarpy County Day Report Center at 7511 South 36th Street in Bellevue, NE from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

The job fair is open to the public.

Individuals are encouraged to dress appropriately and bring their resumes as some interviews will be conducted during the event.

Companies participating in the event include: UPS, KwikShop, Sitel, Job Source USA, WEST, Hilton, Gallup and Creighton University.

LaQuela Weathers, “The Coupon Queen”, will also be on-hand to share her secrets to couponing success.

For more information contact Toni Simmons at 402-593-1523 or Julie Micek at 402-593-4416.

Here are a handful of links to inspire you this weekend.

• Five easy ways to go green, from Daily Danny. These aren’t your usual no-brainers. Take this one, for example: “Take a minute to pull your refrigerator a few inches away from the kitchen wall. By allowing extra air in the back, the condenser coils will work more efficiently because of the increased air circulation.” He has four more where that came from.
• Make a candle holder out of a used water bottle, from Crafting a Green World. And while you’re at it, if you insist on buying bottled water, here are ten more.
• Do you want a garden but have no yard? Check out this drawbridge window garden from TreeHugger, or this pallet-to-garden tutorial from Life on the Balcony.
• While you’re stuck on your little fire escape / balcony / non-yard, maybe you’d be interested in this portable deck.
• I can’t match that segue, but speaking of Segways and two-wheeled transportation, here is a brief tutorial on how to restore an old bike.
• Remember our Month of Erin Wearin’ Goodwill? If you liked that, you’ll love Coriander’s One Dress for One Month project. She’s wearing one dress throughout the entire month of May.

Have a great weekend!

I get so excited when it’s gardening time. Ever since I decided a few years ago that I wanted to take a stab at gardening, I’ve started getting excited about it earlier each year and subsequently allowed my garden to take over more of my back yard. First I built an elevated garden in the back of the yard a few years ago. Then I added a separate squash and zucchini satellite garden last year. This spring, Garden II has expanded to include all elliptical produce (meaning I added cucumbers over there too) and I’m thinking of claiming a flower garden for my broccoli (Garden III).

This love of gardening and my ever-expanding arsenal of crops means that I need a good way to identify my plants and a good way to start them.

sustainablog.org

One of Sustainablog’s 5 DIY indoor gardening projects is to use a phonebook as a seedbed. They’re biodegradable, they’ll help your seedlings grow straight, and — best of all — no matter how much you wish otherwise, someone is going to bring you a new one every year!

So how do you remember what you planted? Sure, if I wait long enough, I’ll be able to figure out which ones are the tomatoes and which ones are the spinach, but TreeHugger has put together a tutorial on using old drink cups to make plant tags. And while it doesn’t have the legitimacy of an accompanying online tutorial, I also use old plastic drink cups — bottoms cut off — to protect my seedlings from birds. The rabbits in my yard are either too polite or too dumb to go eat the things in my garden, but I’ve found that my neighborhood birds see seedlings and think “I should pluck that.” So by placing a drink cup upside down with the bottom cut out, the little guys can get their sun and water while also being shielded from the birds.

It’s not too late to plant your garden, so grab your empty fast food cups and phonebook and get started!

Every once in a while, we here at The GoodTimes blog stumble upon some published research that we think might be of interest to you socially / environmentally / sustainably minded readers. All three of the following papers are published by the Social Sciences Research Network and provided for free.

From Growth to Green Growth — A Framework

Green growth is about making growth processes resource-efficient, cleaner and more resilient without necessarily slowing them. This paper aims at clarifying these concepts in an analytical framework and at proposing foundations for green growth. The green growth approach proposed here is based on (1) focusing on what needs to happen over the next 5-10 years before the world gets locked into patterns that would be prohibitively expensive and complex to modify and (2) reconciling the short and the long term, by offsetting short-term costs and maximizing synergies and economic co-benefits. This, in turn, increases the social and political acceptability of environmental policies. This framework identifies channels through which green policies can potentially contribute to economic growth. However, only detailed country- and context-specific analyses for each of these channels could reach firm conclusion regarding their actual impact on growth. Finally, the paper discusses the policies that can be implemented to capture these co-benefits and environmental benefits. Since green growth policies pursue a variety of goals, they are best served by a combination of instruments: price-based policies are important but are only one component in a policy tool-box that can also include norms and regulation, public production and direct investment, information creation and dissemination, education and moral suasion, or industrial and innovation policies.

The Promise and Problems of Pricing Carbon: Theory and Experience

Because of the global commons nature of climate change, international cooperation among nations will likely be necessary for meaningful action at the global level. At the same time, it will inevitably be up to the actions of sovereign nations to put in place policies that bring about meaningful reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases. Due to the ubiquity and diversity of emissions of greenhouse gases in most economies, as well as the variation in abatement costs among individual sources, conventional environmental policy approaches, such as uniform technology and performance standards, are unlikely to be sufficient to the task. Therefore, attention has increasingly turned to market-based instruments in the form of carbon-pricing mechanisms. We examine the opportunities and challenges associated with the major options for carbon pricing: carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, emission reduction credits, clean energy standards, and fossil fuel subsidy reductions.

Next Generation Recycling and Waste Reduction: Building on the Success of Pennsylvania’s 1988 Legislation

The Municipal Waste Planning, Recycling, and Waste Reduction Act (Act 101 of 1988) keeps millions of tons of materials out of landfills every year. It supports a multi-billion dollar industry that provides tens of thousands of jobs. It also probably affects human environmental behavior more than any other statute in state history. And it reduces greenhouse gas emissions at the same time because of the materials and energy that are saved.

Yet the program is now rudderless and drifting. While the Act contains specific goals, those goals have either been met or ignored, and no new goals have been set. It is impossible to say with a reasonable level of confidence whether recycling of Act 101 materials has increased or decreased over the past decade, let alone by how much. Per capita waste disposal is about the same now as it was when the Act was passed, and was much higher before the current economic downturn.

This Article is a collaboration with law students who learned to “reduce, reuse, recycle” in elementary school. They are part of the first generation who grew up under Act 101.

This Article recommends that Pennsylvania set new and more ambitious recycling and waste reduction goals, use accurate and accessible data to measure progress, and once again give priority to public education on recycling and waste reduction. This Article also contains many specific recommendations for reducing the amount of waste that is disposed of, and for increasing the amount of material that is recycled. These include expansion of the municipalities required to recycle as well as the materials to be included in recycling, greater emphasis on commercial and institutional recycling, requiring the use of “pay-as-you-throw” systems, use of the grant program to support innovations in recycling and waste reduction, and creation of an honor roll to recognize companies for their contributions to recycling and waste reduction. Finally, it recommends stable and permanent financial support for the program.

These recommendations would lead to a more dynamic and effective program – a program more capable of turning waste into economic opportunity and job creation. These recommendations provide a platform for a serious conversation about the future direction of this program. To ensure that the opportunities of this program are fully available to the next generation of Pennsylvanians, including children who are now in elementary school, that conversation needs to begin now.