Green Jobs Board: An Interview with Kristy Drutman
Credit: Browngirl Green
Finding the right green job that fits your skills and passions is harder than ever in this economy. When breaking into the environmental justice field, or any field for that matter, it can feel like you need to know a friend of a friend if you’re ever going to land a job in an industry or movement you’re passionate about. Kristy Drutman, founder of Browngirl Green and cofounder of Green Jobs Board struggled in exactly this way post-college graduation, so she set out to de-gatekeep the climate movement and the world of green jobs.
Founded earlier this year by Drutman and Usman Fahimullah, Green Jobs Board is a POC-led platform that posts job opportunities for environmental job seekers to connect with employers who prioritize the wellbeing of the environment, sustainability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
“Our whole mission is about connecting job seekers to a pathway that makes it easier for them to meet employers who are all building a collective green economy together. What that means is we are not just providing jobs, but we are also providing educational content, workshops, and more community around what it means to get a green job, not just a list of jobs, even though we do that too, of course.”
If you’ve ever scrolled through popular job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, or Glassdoor, you’ll know that just about anyone can post a job opening, which leaves job seekers vulnerable to scammers. It can take hours to find a legitimate and transparent job posting that aligns with your skills and passions. Green Jobs Board makes sure that you’re not left questioning if a job is the right fit for you (or if it was posted by a scammer in Siberia). Each post lists the position's title, the company, its location, the seniority level, and its pay range. If these components match what you’re looking for, you can click to learn more about the position! This saves job seekers hours of scrolling through posts to see if they pay a living wage or if their experience level even qualifies. Yay for transparency!
Credit: browngirl_green on Instagram
“I was just really fed up with how inaccessible and gatekeepy this industry is,” Drutman says. “That's really frustrating when we’re saying that climate change is so urgent, but the ability to get diverse and qualified candidates jobs in this industry is so difficult.”
The initial concept for Green Jobs Board was thought up during a conversation with Fahimullah, who was, at that point, the head of brand and content at Browngirl Green. Drutman told Fahimullah of an idea she had for a recurring content series where she would list out green jobs as a resource for her followers. “I viewed it as ‘this could be like my recurring content every week where I'm just finding some jobs on the internet and making them social posts.’ So we co-designed some posts that were originally living on Browngirl Green and… it was crazy” tells Drutman. “People went nuts for it, they were like ‘oh my gosh, no one has ever made Instagram content about green jobs’” She didn’t realize then how many people would appreciate these posts.
The green jobs posts became some of her best performing content for months. After an influx of questions like “why is this not its own website?” Drutman and Fahimullah decided “we gotta give the people what they want.”
Browngirl Green’s green job postings starting going up in August of 2022. Six months later, they soft launched the Green Jobs Board Instagram page to test the waters of this new endeavor, and the page absolutely blew up! They are now at 20,000 followers.
“Climate Week New York City, we like to say, was kind of like our baptism in the climate world,” says Drutman. “We hosted our first in-person events, I spoke on some panels…and it really felt like we were in the beginnings as a climate-tech start up.” The need for the Green Jobs Board is apparent in the company's rapid growth from a single social media post to a formal organization.
We have the Green Jobs Board today in large part because Drutman began her sustainability journey in college.
“I went to UC Berkeley and studied environmental policy and city planning. During that time, I was learning a lot about climate change and climate issues and really wanted to figure out ways that I could get involved, especially when it came to thinking about the communities that are not as prominently highlighted or addressed when it comes to environmental storytelling in the media.”
Drutman in Austria to speak about their work on new media in the environmental storytelling space
The inspiration for Green Jobs Board comes largely from her own need for green job guidance as a freshly-graduated green job seeker. “I went to one of the best universities in America for environmental studies and I didn’t even know how I was gonna get a job, I didn’t know how to build a career in this field,” she says. “It seemed like most of the jobs I could get were either these weird seasonal stipended jobs or there was really low paying work, and coming from an immigrant family where my mom was still concerned if I was going to be able to pay my bills and live, that wasn’t gonna fly.”
She had to figure it out. She began networking and going to different meetings to try and figure out how to build her career path herself. “when I’d go to my career counselors or even people who I looked up to in this field, no one was really doing work that I was really passionate about, which at the time was thinking about marketing, media, and storytelling.” There was no roadmap, and it was a long and difficult journey from figuring out how to land her first green job to building her own company.
Credit: browngirl_green
In September of this year Drutman visited the White House to learn more about the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a critical legislative action that allots 790 billion dollars to address issues like the climate crisis, health care, and infrastructure. The IRA will aim to create approximately 9 million jobs, remove toxic lead pipes from communities across the country, lower energy costs, lower costs for prescription drugs, and lower healthcare costs among other goals.
“I would say the IRA was really important, on a bare minimum step, for the government to take action when it comes to climate and putting funding behind it. Unfortunately, at the same time, a lot of this funding is inadequate for environmental justice communities especially because there's not enough education being brought to those communities,” Drutman says. “I would really recommend people check out reports written by environmental justice organizations talking about how the funding is inadequate, but that there's still opportunities for those communities to tap into that funding and that requires discussions and conversation.”
Drutman visits the White House to discuss IRA
“In terms of the infrastructure that the IRA is going to be able to create, it's going to be really critical to create so many, quote, unquote, “green jobs,” because it’s gonna allow people who don’t necessarily have a degree to enter into the environmental workforce…” she says.
“they’re gonna need installers, they're gonna need people working on solar manufacturing. All these things where yes you’ll need some type of technical background, but that doesn’t mean you have to have a four year college degree to participate in that. Which is exciting!”
Drutman operates as a bridge in the space of environmental justice. She views different issues from different perspectives, and finds that this holistic form of criticism is a crucial component of her work as a content creator and thought leader. It’s important to recognize the significance of Drutman’s and other activists’ work being legitimized in institutional political spaces, even if those spaces often perpetuate climate inaction. She acknowledges the success in the passing of the IRA, but is also critical of the continued climate destruction committed by the government.
“Going to the White House was this moment where I was able to legitimize my platform; as I move forward and if I want to talk about more radical topics and I want to be pushing things out there, now I have a relationship with people in that level of power to where I want to build that bridge.”
Green Jobs Board and Drutman are doing the work to create a more accessible environmental field. Drutman offered a few words of wisdom to job seekers looking for greener work :
Check out Green Jobs Board!
Spend time identifying your skill set and your passions.
Do not take on a linear mindset, aka “I need to work at this type of organization with this type of mission” This can limit your ability to find a job that fits your wants and skillset.
Test out filtered searches to narrow down your options like Google keyword or LinkedIn hashtags. Look up words like “sustainability,” “circularity,” or “conservation.”
Connect with people online and offline. Build relationships that provide professional and personal value.
Be yourself! Authenticity and genuine connection with people in your field will take you a long way.
If you are either an employer or candidate in the environmental space, you can post a job or find a postingthrough the Green Jobs Board page!