The non-profit workforce development group, Landforce, was awarded $15 million last year along with seven sub-awardees in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA awarded $2 billion nationwide in Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants through the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark climate law.
But now, climate and environmental justice are out at the federal government, and the Pennsylvania grant has evaporated.
LISTEN to the story
A site visit with Landforce’s cohort
Landforce hires a cohort of about 15 people each year in the Pittsburgh area, who have ranged in age from 18 to 63, and trains them to do landscaping, tree pruning, trail construction and other skilled outdoor jobs.
“Landforce combines workforce readiness and environmental stewardship,” said Landforce CEO Ilyssa Manspeizer. Over nearly ten years, she said they’ve trained more than 200 people
“We train and hire people who are typically excluded from family-sustaining jobs,” she said. “We provide intensive training, we provide transitional employment, and we provide support to future jobs for them.”
This spring, its crew was digging holes to plant trees on the hillside in front of the Braddock Civic Center near Pittsburgh. They were actually re-digging holes, because the last two times trees were planted here, they died.
“So we’ve come here to kind of apply our professionalism and our expertise,” said Rick Markee, a site supervisor for Landforce. “To get these ready,” he said, for volunteers to come another time to put the new trees into the soil they’ve prepared.
“It’s helping to keep folks employed as well as giving a hand to communities, helping communities improve, whether it’s air quality, shade, park areas,” said Landforce senior site supervisor Shawn Taylor.
Landforce recruits its crews from the Allegheny County jail, probation offices, community centers, and bus stops – anywhere they can put a flyer.
New crew member Teya Johnson, age 23, was unemployed when she first saw the group’s flyer.
“It caught my eye, it was actually different. I’ve never actually heard anything about Landforce ever in my life until I seen that,” she said. “So it was pretty impressive for me.”
Even before learning land stewardship and landscaping skills, Johnson and her cohort spent their first month at Landforce learning everything from how to open a bank account to the habits they need to hold a job.
“[They learn] things like how to talk about a criminal background if you have one, how to do an elevator pitch to talk about what you do in under two minutes,” said Jasimine Cooper, Landforce’s director of workforce development. When they get this kind of support, she says people change quickly. “I hate to brag, but I see them change within the first couple of weeks.”
Johnson describes seeing positive changes in herself.
“You know, you come outside every day, wake up, not just focusing on work,” Johnson said. “You have to focus on your mind, too as well, and inside your emotions, to actually be great and have your A-game.”
Plans for growth
Landforce had been slowly planning for its own growth. Last year, that effort got a kickstart: It was the lead organization awarded a $15 million community change grant through the EPA.
The grant was shared with a similar group called PowerCorps in Philadelphia, along with several subawardees, which are organizations that will help with their efforts.
“When I found out that we got the grant, I actually cried,” Manspeizer confided. “Because I knew it would enable us to do such good work and to make a difference in so many people’s lives.”
Landforce added staff members and planned to increase the size of its yearly cohort. With the help of the grant money, the group started creating a whole new business for its crew to learn: reusing urban tree waste.
To do that, Landforce leased a warehouse with the grant money in the East End of Pittsburgh in February for what they call The Mill.
“So all of our material we recover out of the waste stream here within a 10 or 15-mile radius of the East End,” said Ed Johnson, the Landforce director of wood re-use. “It could be an insect-infested tree in somebody’s yard. It could be a utility right-away removal tree.”
The high-quality lumber they collect and process can be used for things like furniture and cabinets, and the other wood will go toward palettes and other lower-grade products.
But it’s the waste from that wood processing that’s the real star at The Mill: biochar, a carbon product made from wood chips.
When mixed into the soil, biochar reduces lead and heavy metals, “which is very important because we have a lot of legacy heavy metals in our soil,” said Erin Copeland, program team manager at the Allegheny County Conservation District, which is a sub-awardee on the EPA grant. They plan to help get Landforce’s biochar to vacant lots and local farms.
“The biochar, once it’s incorporated into the soil, doesn’t allow for plant uptake of that lead anymore, and so it really helps urban farmers who want to be growing food in the city,” she said.
Early this year, using money from the grant, Landforce spent over a million dollars to buy the sawmill equipment, which the EPA required to be made in the U.S., including a log splitter, various trucks and the biochar kiln.
On-again, off-again…terminated
But like many other federal grants, there’s been chaos around their grant in recent months, according to Manspeizer.
“That funding has been frozen, unfrozen, frozen, and remains frozen now,” she said in mid-April.
Then, in late April, the grant money was unfrozen again. Within days, her group sent in a progress report that was due, showing that despite the on-again, off-again funding, they have been able to meet all of the grant metrics.
“Unfortunately, the very next day we got a termination notice from the federal government, from the EPA, that they were planning on terminating our grant,” she said.
EPA confirmed this in an email, saying, “The agency determined that the application no longer supports Administration priorities and the award has been cancelled.”
“This project would help increase American manufacturing, create jobs, strengthen our supply chain and drive energy security projects – I can’t understand why anyone would want to cancel that,” said Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman in a statement. Fetterman wrote a letter in late April to EPA Administor Lee Zeldin on behalf of Landforce and the other subawardees.
“I’ve been in contact with Administration officials to demand an answer on why they’ve decided to terminate this grant illegally. I’ll continue to do everything I can to get Landforce’s funding turned back on,” the statement said.
Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick did not respond to a request for comment.
This loss of funding is painful for Manspeizer, who is adamant that despite this, Landforce will survive.
“We may not be able to achieve everything that we wanted to achieve, that we had expected to in this great year that we have planned ahead,” she said. “But we will make it to 2026.”
They won’t be able to train as many people as they’d planned — people like Teya Johnson, for whom Landforce provides new hope for the future.
“You know, you don’t get that much of an opportunity to do better and achieve better things in your life,” Johnson said, “and experience and learn things that you haven’t learned before.”
Landforce is currently working on an appeal of the EPA’s grant termination decision.
