Employing Gulf Coast Residents in Coastal Restoration Projects

NEW ORLEANS, LA — Today AECOM, a leading global provider of professional technical and management support services in more than 140 countries around the world, and Limitless Vistas, Inc. (LVI), a nonprofit organization based in New Orleans, LA, announced a partnership to train and employ some of the region’s most at-risk youth for new jobs in environmental restoration.

LVI has been training local at-risk youth in the skills needed for environmental jobs for the past six years. With the opportunity of hundreds of millions of dollars in ecosystem restoration projects coming online across the Gulf Coast in the coming years – as a result of fines and penalties from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill – LVI is eager to find work for its graduates. They have trained more than 350 youths to date and are seeking new ways to connect disadvantaged workers to new environmental careers and skills. To this end, they forged a groundbreaking agreement with AECOM, a Fortune 500 company ranked by Engineering News-Record as the number one design firm in the U.S. with an extensive history working on ecosystem restoration, to work together to develop a comprehensive training program that will help prepare these students for jobs in the environmental construction industry. This would include familiarizing them with on-the-job construction practices and safety standards, informing them about likely projects to be constructed in the near future and introducing them to prospective construction contractors.

“We’ve been talking about the chronic need for proper youth job training with local environmental resource managers for years,” says Patrick A. Barnes, a professional geologist, President of BFA Environmental, and founder of LVI. “We’re delighted that AECOM has responded with a desire to provide project access in the Gulf Coast and to allow students from LVI’s training program to shadow their environmental field personnel over the next year.” Barnes and representatives from the Corps Network and American Youth Works worked out the agreement with AECOM, which will ultimately include restoration projects across all five Gulf States.

“AECOM is committed to finding ways to ensure that our projects bring benefits to both the environment and the people of the Gulf Coast,” says Dr. Steve Mathies, AECOM’s vice president for coastal protection and restoration. “LVI is paving the road toward training and placing those who have suffered the most with jobs and projects that will benefit everyone.”