I’m heading to Chicago in a couple weeks and I’m looking forward to finding out more about the green collar jobs in Chicago. If you’re in Chi-town and know about the green movement there please let me know in the comments!

He is part foot soldier, part guinea pig in a movement that starts in the Englewood garden and may reach all the way to the Oval Office, although he may not fully appreciate it. “I’m not going to lie to you,” Wright said one crisp morning while working a row of radishes in a greenhouse. “I needed a job. Long as I was plugged in somewhere, that was OK.”

Wright works for Growing Home Inc., which offers “social business enterprise” job training for low-income people. It and he are part of the “green-collar economy,” a movement toward an environmentally sound, robust economy with a vast array of jobs, some of which are rooted in withering small towns or decimated inner cities. And guess what metropolis experts say provides the most fertile environment for the green-collar economy? Chicago, Rust Belt capital and adopted hometown of the next president, whose New Energy for America plan calls for investing $150 billion over the next decade to create 5 million new “green jobs.”