| The sunny side of a bad economy - by Teddy Harder | As a kid growing up in Denmark I used to hear people talking about the weather - the extend of our creative small-talk routine included little more than politics, soccer and then….the weather. Surprisingly Danes usually don’t like the rain. However, each spring I saw my folks proudly show off the produce from our backyard; green beans, strawberries and the like. And I wondered; how would we get all these wonderful veggies if we had not lived (suffered) through the rainy season? Economists predicted that Americans would pay down an estimated 4 billion of debt in the last quarter. In fact they paid off 21 billion. To some that may show signs of fear and represent hard times but we forget that paying down debt also bare fruit (money in the bank) for the consumers and once the dark clouds eventually evaporates we’ll all be better off. In August POH began a five month pre-parole planning seminar at a local institution with the goal of preparing inmates for parole & subsequent employment, primarily in the solar industry. In my years of working with inmates, preparing them for parole I’ve rarely seen a more in-tuned crowd as those being released into today’s economy. The fact that the Governor of California is now entertaining the idea of releasing massive amounts of inmates early to save costs is also having an effect on those who thought they had years to go before release. Those years are normally spend simply “doing time”. Most of the people attending the POH Pre-parole class now have a more realistic sense of the challenges ahead. I’m proud to say they are working much more intensely toward preparing themselves during this class than other workshops we’ve offered in the past. Employment opportunities in the PV (solar) industry are slowly beginning to become readily available, still inmates would be competing with the many unemployed construction workers already seeking new jobs. Therefore it’s important to train our participants well before release.Green energy policies are of course a highly polarized subject and thus POH will have to patiently move forward while society debates the best approach. However, I do believe sometimes one must invest long term and thus we are taking our chances that the PV industry will become an vital part of the job market in the near future. Well prepared and educated POH participants might very well benefit from putting up with the dark clouds and ripe the benefits once the sun begins to shine again on this great land.
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