On Thursday, August 15th, the Healy Administration celebrated Salem’s plan to build the second port in Massachusetts dedicated specifically to the construction of offshore wind farms. SAFE was proudly a part of this event.
Bonnie Bain, SAFE’s Offshore Wind Program Manager, shared these words:
“SAFE was founded 23 years ago to shut down our coal plant. As watchdogs for this port, we talked about our dream of offshore wind at our founding, and here it is being developed today. With an ethos for community power at our roots and founders with a strong social justice focus, we will always center Environmental Justice through community power building and system change.
SAFE knows that when change finally does come it can happen so fast it doesn’t include everyone, so we engaged across the North Shore to make sure community organizations knew about offshore wind, that our workforce development efforts locally focused on ensuring equitable pathways to union pre-apprenticeship green jobs, and that language access was at the forefront. Since these efforts have begun we have had three years of students from Salem and the surrounding area attending a free KidWind summer camp, MassHire had their first graduating tech school class for sustainable pathways all with students from local EJ communities.
The Salem port project needed a Community Benefit Agreement modeled on the one SAFE pushed for and influenced when the gas plant came to town. SAFE built a coalition with surrounding neighborhood groups as well as civic organizations – the League of Women Voters and the Latino Leadership Coalition. We called ourselves Salem Offshore Wind Alliance or SOWA. We came together under environmental justice principles and convinced the Conservation Law Foundation to represent us. It was a year’s worth of regular meetings on zoom, breaking bread, attending planning board sessions and speaking up, putting together our asks and working with the mayor and his team on negotiations.
The CBA that resulted invests in the roads and green space around the port, creates access to a 21st century facility, had a historic investment in childcare (and trust me I was feeling that need during this process), funding for the Salem High Career and Technical Education program, scholarships for our students, language access, funding for the Massachusett tribe to conduct a fish weir project with 4th graders every year, metrics for BIPOC, women, and local union hires, and importantly, a commitment to port electrification.”
When SAFE turns 25 we’ll see a world class wind marshaling facility at our doorstep with historic environmental justice investments in Salem.
Here is a video of the Groundbreaking event:
SAFE is hard at work to ensure port electrification happens as soon as possible. The port is expected to be up and running by 2026.