ENVIRONMENT AND JUSTICE EDITION
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Dear Commonweal Friends, As you read this, the United States presidential election is, presumably, over. As I write, the outcome remains in doubt. Commonweal is not a partisan community, but our values hang in the balance. No matter the outcome, we live in perilous times. The center cannot hold, as Yeats said. The voices of the right are ascendant right now, in the United States, Europe, Russia, the Philippines, and other countries. Strident nationalisms arise as desperate refugees storm frontiers around the world, fleeing wars, gang warfare, hunger, climate change, and all the ills of our time. Anxiety, depression, and anger are not my friends in these times. I seem to be so constituted that I see more clearly when my mind is calm. When my mind is clear, I can see what I can change and what I cannot change. I believe the things I cannot change are part of a lawful unfolding of history and, indeed, a lawful unfolding of the universe. This does not make me a fatalist. I believe my efforts—and those of countless millions of others—to move the arc of history toward justice are part of this lawful unfolding of history and the universe. If my best efforts do not result in the outcome I hope for, I have done my best. I leave the rest in the hands of whatever we want to call the great historic and cosmic processes of unfoldment.
Whatever happens in the election, the Great Work, as it is called in the mystical traditions, remains the same. My yoga teacher’s teacher, Swami Sivananda, was a physician and a large forceful man. He had an ashram in northern India that I visited once. In front of the ashram was a pillar of stone that said (in my memory):
Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Nurse the sick. Visit the prisoner. This is divine life. This has always been the Great Work. The Great Work is forever work of skillful compassion—of wisdom, compassion, and dedication—the work of head, heart, and hands. This is the work Commonweal has done for 40 years. It stretches out before us for as long as our community of service proves useful. One could even say it is a work to which some are called to consecrate a life.
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THE
JUVENILE
JUSTICE
PROGRAM
Working to Ensure Youth Access to Jobs and Higher Education by David Steinhart, Director, Juvenile Justice Program Over the last two years, the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program has played a lead role in modifying California law to expand rehabilitation options for justice system youth. In partnership with the California Juvenile Court Judges Association, we have deployed in two distinct areas—justice system law and labor law—to modernize state policy on youth access to jobs, higher education, and military service. One of these efforts was the creation of a new and user-friendly process for the sealing of juvenile offense records. The other was a change in California employment law, limiting what employers can ask job applicants about juvenile offense history. Governor Brown approved the employment law measure (AB 1843) on September 27, 2016, after a stormy passage through the California Legislature. The premise behind both efforts is that the juvenile justice system is different than the adult criminal justice system. The juvenile justice system is founded on the principle of rehabilitation. It is governed by rules of confidentiality and operates on a lesser due process model (no jury trials, for example) than the adult system. Youth who complete terms of probation or diversion in the juvenile system should not be subjected to lifetime disabilities based on what they did as children. That’s why it is important for them to be able to seal their juvenile justice record. It’s also why employers should not be able to dig down into juvenile offense history and then use it to deny employment.
The new juvenile court “auto sealing” law.
Prior to 2014, a youth who wanted to seal their juvenile record had to file a petition with the court, hire an attorney, and go through a sometimes costly process that was beyond the reach of many. State Senator Mark Leno (D– San Francisco) authored breakthrough legislation in 2014 to make record sealing more accessible. His measure (SB 1038) created a new process by which the court 2
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would automatically seal delinquency records upon “satisfactory completion” of diversion or probation. In 2015, Commonweal and the California Juvenile Court Judges Association co-sponsored important follow-up legislation. That measure (AB 666) better defined how the new sealing process worked. We were privileged to have as a bill author Assembly Member Mark Stone (D-Santa Cruz), an emerging legislative champion of foster care and youth justice reform. This was a hard-fought campaign, with law enforcement opposition, but the outcome was positive. Based on these new California sealing laws, thousands of young people each year are getting their records “auto-sealed” by the courts. This opens new pathways to jobs, higher education, and military service—pathways that were blocked before these enactments.
Banning employer inquiry into juvenile justice history.
In 2016, the sponsors of the sealing law reforms asked Assembly Member Stone to tackle the same problem from a different angle. Stone introduced AB 1843, amending the Labor Code to ensure that an employer may not ask a job applicant about juvenile offenses or juvenile justice history. This was to clarify current law that already limits employers to asking about adult convictions, which do not include juvenile system adjudications. AB 1843 was intended to make this distinction crystal clear to employers, while modernizing the California Labor Code to bring it up to standard with “ban the box” (the check box that asks if applicants have a criminal record) fair employment practices being widely adopted in state and federal jurisdictions across the United States. AB 1843 quickly became controversial. The bill was furiously opposed by business lobbyists, including the state Chamber of Commerce and California health facility associations. Those health sector employers wanted to keep an exemption giving them wide latitude to ask about
adult and juvenile offenses where the job involved contact with patients or drug supplies. Bill sponsors and the author, Mark Stone, negotiated at length with these opponents, coming to agreement on new criteria that would protect patient safety by allowing them to ask about juvenile adjudications for sex and drug offenses going back five years. This was not enough for the opposition. For me, as someone who has worked on California law reforms for more than three decades, it was a new experience to deal with commercial interest groups rather than the familiar justice system stakeholders (prosecutors, police, probation). Our business opponents played hardball. Even after the bill was amended to accommodate their patient safety concerns, they circulated in the Capitol, claiming falsely that the bill would let juvenile murderers and rapists find their way into health sector jobs without discovery. These opposition tactics worked well enough to make the floor votes razor thin. The bill passed each house by a bare-majority vote, before winning approval by the governor. Effective January 2017, California employers will need to adjust their job applications and hiring practices to ensure that juvenile offense histories are no longer used to block employment. These are leading-edge reforms in California. They reflect recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court, limiting the disabilities that can be imposed on justice system youth, based on the Court’s recognition that children are developmentally different than adults. These reforms also represent a course correction for older California laws that kept insurmountable barriers in the recovery path of justice system youth. To learn more about the work of the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program, please go to commonweal.org/program/jjp/ We would like to thank the following foundations for their generous support of the Commonweal Juvenile Justice Program: Annie E. Casey Foundation, Battery Powered, The California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, Sierra Health Foundation, Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, van Löben Sels/ RembeRock Foundation.
Taking It All In: The Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center by Sharyle Patton, Director, Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center
In the early 1990s, biomonitoring studies around the globe showed that humans and ecosystems were being flooded by environmental chemicals—chemicals used in industrialized processes to manufacture products, grow food, produce pharmaceuticals, and create much of the built environment. Partially in response to the growing body of science documenting the presence of industrial chemicals in human bodies, the United Nations began negotiations to create a global treaty that would regulate a set of toxic industrial chemicals: persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN.org), a global health advocacy network co-founded by Commonweal, worked closely with negotiators to create a treaty, known as the Stockholm Convention, to address the growing POPs concern. As Northern Co-chair of IPEN, I had the opportunity to bring scientists and experts to the convention to present research on toxic exposures and the consequential risks to the wellbeing of future generations. The Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center (CBRC) continues this work today by collaborating with scientists and community members in designing and implementing environmental monitoring. The results of this research can inform personal choice and policy development, focus further scientific inquiry, and guide community initiatives for pollution reduction. CBRC is currently working in three areas: chemical exposures to firefighters, preparing for pregnancy, and community pollution near gas production activities.
Firefighters Working with United Fire Service Women, San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation, Silent Spring Institute, Breast Cancer Fund, and scientists from the University of California San Francisco, we are testing women firefighters and office workers for chemicals linked to breast cancer. The California Breast Cancer Research Foundation funds this study. Results from this exposure study will be available in 2017, but in the meantime we are working with firefighters to develop trainings about the need to decontaminate firefighter gear after leaving a fire. We produced a video that used shaving cream instead of soot to show how contaminated gear can spread chemicals around the fire station. CBRC is also working with the International Association of Firefighters to test dust from fire stations for the presence of toxic flame retardants. Study results indicate that fire station dust carries higher levels of flame retardants than dust samples from air planes, electronic waste breakdown sites, offices, and residences. Firefighters may continue to be exposed to toxic flame retardants long after the fire is over. Study results will be used to develop decontamination methods and to support regulations restricting use of toxic flame retardants.
CBRC helped create a video to show how contaminated gear can spread chemicals using shaving cream to represent the toxic chemicals.
Oil and Gas Production CBRC partnered with community members living near gas production activities to carry out a methods development study that tested air monitoring tools and human biomonitoring protocols to assess community exposures to chemicals associated with oil and gas production. The study’s results indicate that our protocol could be used on a larger scale to produce a statistically significant set of data. Preliminary results indicate that community members may be exposed to more than 150 chemicals related to gas production on a daily basis. There are currently no established scientific methods to assess the toxicity of chemical mixtures at low exposure levels occurring over decades. For more information about CBRC, please go to commonweal.org/program/brc/ CBRC thanks the California Breast Cancer Research Program, Coming Clean Collaborative, and the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation for their generous support.
Healthy Babies A team of researchers from the Community Outreach and Translation Team at The Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Leukemia and the Environment (CIRCLE) and CBRC are developing materials for young couples planning a family. A first project is a shadow box puppet presentation by artist Miranda Kahn that depicts a young couple learning about the dangers of cigarette smoking, linked to asthma and leukemia in children born to parents who have smoked before conception and during pregnancy.
Researchers animate the dangers of cigarette smoking during a shadow box puppet presentation by artist Miranda Kahn. C O M M O N W E A L ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 16
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Launches to Transform Prenatal Care for Healthier Babies by Alexandra Destler, Director, SafetyNEST Pravati Anath and her husband recently moved to the Bay Area from India and are settling into many facets of a new life, ranging from food and culture to expecting their first child. During her prenatal visit at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, Pravati was intrigued by a flyer recruiting pregnant women to test a health education platform to reduce toxic chemical exposures in the home. She had heard about not microwaving food in plastic containers, and was motivated to find out other ways to safeguard her baby and pregnancy. She signed up, and learned much more information that inspired immediate changes in her home, from using cast iron instead of nonstick cookware linked with serious health effects, to selecting an unfinished, solid wood crib instead of a plywood crib, which releases formaldehyde and other chemicals. Toxic chemicals have a major impact on childhood diseases, adult diseases, and morbidity. Phthalates, Bisphenol A, flame retardants, Teflon, and pesticides are among the chemicals of concern, with increasing evidence of widespread exposures and potential health risks, particularly during vulnerable periods of development. According to the 4
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International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), “Exposure to toxic environmental chemicals during pregnancy and breastfeeding is ubiquitous and is a threat to healthy human reproduction…Preventing exposure to environmental chemicals is a priority for reproductive health professionals everywhere” (October 2015). Because of a lack of training, tools, and expertise, few reproductive healthcare professionals counsel pregnant women about the risks of chemical exposures. The current landscape for environmental health counseling is fragmented, disaggregated, and impersonal. In addition, there is an abundance of environmental information on the Internet that is fear-based, complex, and difficult to implement for most pregnant women. Given this current setting, we see two opportunities: 1) to educate pregnant women with simple health-based messaging while they are uniquely positioned to make important lifestyle and behavior changes to promote the health of their pregnancy; and 2) to equip reproductive healthcare professionals with evidence-based tools to counsel patients about reducing exposures to environmental chemicals, both in the preconception period and prenatally. SafetyNEST’s purpose is to transform prenatal care for healthier babies by reducing diseases linked to toxic chemical exposure. Launched under the Commonweal umbrella last year, SafetyNEST is well positioned to become a go-to, trusted source by equipping health providers and every pregnant woman with a one-stop, highly engaging, and personalized health education toolkit designed to reduce toxic chemical exposures in the workplace and at home. Our platform delivers evidence-based content adapted from leading research institutions and simple health-based recommendations via the web, mobile devices, and printed resources that are distributed through health professionals and promoted with strategic alliances and social media. We released an initial “minimum viable product” (MVP), which we tested with 50 Bay Area pregnant women in partnership with our anchor partner, UCSF’s Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. Positive
and validating results from the initial product-in-progress are informing MVP version 2.0, now being developed. The SafetyNEST toolkit includes a simulation of the home environment that allows pregnant women to navigate through common spaces and learn how to reduce their exposure to chemicals and promote healthy living environments in each setting. The simulation is coupled with easy-to-use messages and resources about reducing exposures, and also includes evidence-based guidance for health care professionals to counsel their patients. In addition to the health education platform, SafetyNEST is working closely with our strategic partners on a communications- and social mediadriven, movement-building campaign. In addition to the esteemed UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, SafetyNEST partners include the American Medical Women’s Association and Mount Sinai Center for Children’s Environmental Health in New York. We think SafetyNEST represents a breakthrough innovation in how health providers can respond to the risk of toxic chemicals and adverse reproductive and developmental health outcomes. We hope that the combination of a widely dispersed SafetyNEST health education platform and a powerful communications and social media campaign will change every woman’s expectation of her prenatal care and will, ultimately, support healthcare’s important role in reducing pregnant women’s exposure to toxic chemicals. For more information, visit www.mysafetynest. org or contact Alexandra Destler, Founder and Director, SafetyNEST, at Alexandra@ mysafetynest.org SafetyNEST thanks As You Sow, The Canary Fund of RSF Social Finance, The Barbara & Donald Jonas Family Fund, and the MMHBO Fund for their generous support.
Commonweal: An Incubator for Good by Steve Heilig, Director of Public Health and Education, CHE Not all big accomplishments are public ones, or trumpeted widely. Commonweal has any number of ongoing projects worthy of wide recognition, but others might be called “start-ups” that were launched at Commonweal and then went on to great and ongoing success. Long before the term “incubator” became a term for a place where tech companies are launched, some lasting efforts in health, education, and justice began here.
First Do No Harm noharm.org Physicians take an oath to “do no harm.” Twenty years ago, a select group of concerned environmental and other professionals gathered at Commonweal to see if that precept could be applied to health facilities and beyond. It started with a focus on chemical contamination related to healthcare operations, especially medical waste incineration, which had been identified as the leading source of dioxin pollution in our country. And as Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) Co-founder and President Gary Cohen now reports, “More than 4,500 waste incinerators have been shut down. Mercury thermometers and blood pressure devices have disappeared from hospitals and we now have a global treaty to phase them out by the year 2020. Hospital leaders have begun to switch to safer plastics, greener
cleaners, and healthier building materials. Hundreds of hospitals are now sourcing local and sustainable food for their patients and employees. Thousands of hospitals around the world are working to reduce their climate footprint.” HCWH now has more than 250 organizational partners, and Cohen has received much recognition for his work, most recently being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”). As he reflects, “We have come a long way in the last twenty years. What began as a small group of environmental health advocates has grown into a global movement, and leaders within institutions have become champions for sustainable health care.” HCWH’s scope and vision have expanded to include the threat of climate change, clean energy, sustainable food production, and more, and as Cohen concludes, “This movement we’ve collectively built over the past 20 years gives me hope for the future and that, together, we will redefine health care in the 21st century. Twenty years in, we’re just getting started.”
For the Birds commonweal.org/program/environment-justice-special-projects Steve Lerner and Burr Heneman, two of Commonweal’s earliest founding partners, launched one of the first campaigns to stop oil drilling off the Northern California Coast decades ago. More recently, Burr has been most active on another, related front. Seabirds are among the most threatened animals on earth, with 39 percent of seabird species listed as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. In 2006, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation decided to start a global seabird conservation program. They turned to Burr, director of Commonweal’s Oceans Program—a natural choice because of Burr’s prior history in the worlds of seabird conservation and science. Burr designed the program and guided it through its first three years. Ten years on, it remains the largest source of funding for seabird conservation in the world, focused on restoring seabird breeding islands by removing introduced predators, and reducing deaths of albatrosses and other seabirds in the world’s industrial fisheries.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. – Harry S. Truman
Antibiotic Resistance Project keepantibioticsworking.com In 2001, Commonweal convened a daylong meeting at the San Francisco Medical Society, co-chaired by public health icons Drs. Philip Lee and Lester Breslow, to address the overuse of antibiotics in meat production. This overuse had been identified by the American Medical Association—in no small part due to Commonwealassociated work—as a major threat, as it is an ideal means of breeding bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Such resistance has become an ever-worsening threat to human health, with a growing danger of untreatable pandemics of infectious disease. Some have called this the biggest potential threat to human welfare. Our 2001 conference helped launch a network of advocates from many fields who work on this issue, and this past year, after much effort and some other victories, California became the first state to pass legislation requiring much stricter regulations on the use of antibiotics in agriculture. Major companies, like Walmart, McDonalds, and others, have begun adopting more responsible stewardship policies. Much more attention overall is focused on this issue, at least in part due to the campaigns sparked at our meeting 16 years ago. Most recently, the United Nations convened a firstever global meeting on the threat.
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The Gift of Compassion: Using Creativity for Healing and Wellness by Angela Oh and Tu Ying Ming, Co-Directors, Gift of Compassion
The Gift of Compassion worked with the Right Way Foundation to build a six-month fellowship program that engaged six young adults, all of whom grew up in the foster care system in Los Angeles County. Lateesha, Teddy, William, Ernesto, Johna, and Briana opening the session with meditation.
The Gift of Compassion is Commonweal’s newest program.
It has been almost 25 years since Los Angeles imploded after officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were prosecuted for the beating of Rodney King. A billion dollars worth of property damage alone, not to mention the emotional, psychological, and spiritual impact of arson, looting, and vandalism on mostly new immigrant families, who were targeted in the initial days of the crisis, didn’t make any sense. Much like today—when many of us contemplate how we should engage in national, statewide, and local politics— people 25 years ago were totally confused and uncertain about whom they could trust, including themselves. And then 15 years ago, 9/11 happened, with suicide missions carried out in New York, at the World Trade Center towers, at the Pentagon, and at a field in Pennsylvania. The Rodney King event and the 9/11 bombings were tragedies that we all know and that have had lasting effects on race relations. After all this time, it seems that we are not learning from our collective experiences about the importance of trauma, grief, and the need to heal in an authentic way. The analysis these days is too focused on race alone. These lessons extend much beyond race, class, and religious or sexual orientation. We have reached a point of losing our humanity at the individual, organizational, and institutional levels. People feel lost.
Tu Ying Ming (known as Tu2) and Angela Oh, based in Los Angeles, work at the intersection of art, contemplative practice, and justice. Their focus is on serving a highly diverse community, including young people and adults in the California justice system. Their partners in the program include longtime Commonweal friend Orland Bishop of Shadetree Multicultural Foundation and Dr. Rasheeda Hawk, a biophysicist whose interest is in applied research and the study of the neuroscience related to meditation. Tu2 is a Taiwan-born visual artist, whose extraordinary exhibit, 108 Faces of Compassion, had its international opening
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Now is the time for creativity, less fear, and more loving. The Gift of Compassion uses art as a portal for the practice of meditation and contemplation for the purpose of healing and wellness. As co-creators of the program, we drew from our respective, individual experiences and our common interest in sharing a deeply personal, yet common practice: meditation. Every project includes creating original works of art as part of the collaboration or partnership with other groups. All program activities are designed to meet the needs of the people in our groups, people searching for clarity, greater capacity to inspire and energize, and the ability to see deeply into their own condition. Commonweal is a place where a focus on healthy, authentic relationships can be nurtured. We’ve seen the ripple effect in many of our program activities and groups, both in northern and southern California, with adults and youth searching for a way to heal. Focusing on foster youth, the Gift of Compassion worked with the Right Way Foundation to build a six-month fellowship program that engaged six young adults, all of whom were part of the foster care system in Los Angeles County. The capstone project for the group was to host a conference. They planned, outreached, and implemented their vision, creating a day-long conversation called, “Closing the Gaps in Service Knowledge
in the Commonweal Gallery in 2013. In the 1990s, Tu2’s conceptual exhibition, Mao-ology—composed of 50 iconic images, including MickeyMao, MinnieMao, AndrogynousMao, and ZeroMao—was presented in Taiwan and Belgium and met with critical acclaim. Following Mao-ology was Timeless, a family retrospective in paintings that captured three generations of the Tu clan and its history. Today, Tu2 creates portraits that illuminate the essence and interior qualities of each subject, using silver point pencil. The work is considered meditation as manifest through the artist. Each portrait expresses awakening, affinity, and compassion (www.tu-2arts.com).
Briana sharing her art and story through poetry.
for Foster Youth.” The conference opened with a check-in process that we used every time the group met—conversation about what is happening in their lives, their struggles, their determination to keep a positive frame of mind as they met each and every challenge. Students got their inspiration for organizing the conference during a fivehour sharing session after the shooting of Alton Sterling, Philando Castillo, and five police officers in Dallas. They asked themselves questions about racism in American society and questioned the painful reality that Black lives do not seem to matter. How is this connected to the riots, the Trade Tower bombings, and the elections
in 2016? As a teacher once said, “Everything, everyone, is inextricably interconnected through all of space and time.” The Gift of Compassion, as a program, may not survive through all of space and time, but the essence of its work—love, caring, and hope—will live on, as long as humanity exists. Find out more about this program on the Gift of Compassion website: www.compassion.tu2art.com Gift of Compassion thanks The California Endowment and The Whitman Institute for their funding.
Angela is a Zen Buddhist meditation teacher, attorney, and nationally recognized leader on social and racial justice issues. Known as a clear voice of the Korean American community after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Angela served on President Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race as one of seven advisors. Angela currently works as a mediator of disputes involving civil rights violations alleging race, gender, age, disability, and other forms of discrimination. Her experiences have included teaching, public speaking on issues of race, racism, and justice, and service on select commissions and boards at local, state, and national levels.
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+ Giving Communities a Voice in Breast Cancer Research by Heather Sarantis, Director, QuickStart
In earlier years of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, the staff noticed that an increasing number of participants were younger women with breast cancer, many of them trying to figure out how to say goodbye to their children. This heartbreaking realization led Commonweal into our work on environmental health with an obvious question: Why is this happening? Despite years of research, we have more questions than answers. Approximately 80 percent of women who develop breast cancer have no family history of the disease. However, there is something about industrialized society that makes life riskier for women. Environmental exposures from air and water pollution and everyday products, as well as the stressors of racism, poverty, and other forms of oppression, may all increase a woman’s risk for breast cancer. For the past five years, Commonweal has partnered with California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP) to train community members and scientists to conduct research together. The QuickStart training helps these teams write winning funding proposals. Some of the teams that were successfully funded by CBCRP are investigating the following topics:
Institute of California are investigating the link between breast cancer and exposure to legacy mining contaminants commonly found in soil samples in the Sierra Nevadas. ■■
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Rural disparities in breast cancer mortality: The Humboldt Community Breast Health Project partnered with the California Center for Rural Policy to investigate why women in Humboldt County have high breast cancer mortality rates and to better understand if women living in frontier or rural areas of California have higher mortality rates compared to urban areas in the state. Cadmium and arsenic exposure in a mining impacted community: Sierra Streams and Cancer Prevention C O M M O N W E A L ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 16
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Risk factors of beauty products on African American women: The Inland Empire African American Wellness Collaborative partnered with Loma Linda University to explore whether African American women’s use of hair products, such as relaxers, have any role in increasing their risk for breast cancer. Latinas’ experiences of breast cancer treatment: Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute and Sutter Health partnered to investigate barriers and social and cultural norms shaping treatment experiences and decision making among low-income Latinas with breast cancer. Using CBCRP to promote environmental justice in Wilmington, CA: The Coalition for a Safe Environment and the Center for Cancer Prevention and Control Research at UCLA are investigating the community’s exposure to benzene from nearby oil refineries. Breastfeeding to reduce breast cancer in young mothers: Brighter Beginnings and Public Health Institute are investigating how to best encourage teenage mothers to breastfeed their babies, as breastfeeding can be protective against breast cancer.
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Impact of reducing chemical exposure to the human breast: Breast Cancer Over Time and California Pacific Medical Research Institute are comparing breast cells before and after 28 days of using personal care products free of hormone disrupting chemicals to better understand the biological processes of cancer development.
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Using telenavigators to support rural breast cancer patients: Connecting to Care and Cancer Prevention Institute of California are testing the feasibility of using telehealth technology to help women with breast cancer who live in rural areas and may not otherwise have access to support services.
This partnered approach to research, called community-based participatory research, allows people affected by breast cancer to ask research questions based on what they are learning in their community. We will be offering this training again in 2017. For more information see: commonweal.org/ program/quickstart The QuickStart training program is supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R25CA188482. The content is solely the responsibility of the trainers and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
New CHE Website Transforms Access to Diverse Resources by Elise Miller, Director, Collaborative on Health and the Environment If something is 15-years-old in the tech world, it’s considered a dinosaur—or perhaps even older, like space dust after the Big Bang. The Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) website could have been categorized as such—until this fall. After years of building our website in an organic (some would say, piecemeal) fashion, without an overarching plan or structure, we finally have a site that not only brings us fully into the 21st century, but also truly reflects CHE’s systems approach to primary prevention. Overhauling a website may sound like something that’s nice to do, but not particularly critical. For CHE, however, our educational tools and discussion forums depend on the accessibility and accuracy of the resources we share—as well as how up-to-date that information is. We had become increasingly hobbled by the lack of ease in navigating our site and finding key materials. People couldn’t even view our site on mobile devices, making it even more obsolete in this day and age. For staff, it also required time-consuming manual updates, such as cutting and pasting information and plowing through massive amounts of unorganized data to find specific content to highlight.
a systems approach to
health
Now our site is fully streamlined. Based on an ecological model of health—a model that is central to every aspect of our work—we bring to light multiple factors that interact at multiple levels to impact our health. We continue to prioritize emerging science on toxic chemicals and health, and we include other factors, such as food and agriculture, socioeconomic status, the built environment, psychosocial experience, technology, and broad-scale global impacts (see graphic, below). In short, we offer one-stop shopping. This means that on any given page, you will find an overview of a specific topic and links to all the relevant information we have to offer, including reports, conference calls, newsfeeds, graphics, and other key websites. Everything is interconnected, or as John Muir said, everything is “hitched to everything else.” Recreating our website was also an impetus to pilot a new practicum/ internship program last summer for graduate and undergraduate students interested in environmental health. We worked with four highly motivated students from the University of Washington and one from Vassar College to research content for multiple pages of our site. Collectively, they put in
FOOD & AGRICULTURE ENVIRONMENT
To see CHE’s new website, please go to healthandenvironment.org CHE is grateful to Boston University/ NIEHS-funded Superfund Research Program, Wallace Genetic Foundation, and foundations who prefer to remain anonymous for their generous support of our work. CHE also thanks Practicum Student Maggie Lind and Intern Jessica Hale for their outstanding contributions to our new website.
CHEMICAL ENVIRONMENT SOCIOECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT
BUILT L ENVIRONMENT
TECHNOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENT
hundreds of hours that contributed significantly to this effort. In return, CHE staff closely mentored them, guiding them through the research and synthesis process with impressive results. At the end of her experience, one of the interns wrote, “Excited energy would pulse through me when developing each page and seeing the final products. I also gained a vast amount of knowledge regarding the environmental relationships to major diseases and health conditions. Through my work with CHE, I now firmly believe that we cannot adequately address these health problems without also addressing their environmental contributors.” We don’t expect everyone to be as excited as our intern when visiting CHE’s new website, but we do hope that you’ll find lots of useful resources to inform your professional work and your personal choices—and ultimately, improve our individual and collective health for generations to come.
PSYCHOSOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
Health, Diseases & Disabilities
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
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W I T H
G R AT I T U D E
We express our deep gratitude to the following organizations that have supported Commonweal this year: The A & A Fund As You Sow
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Alberta S. Kimball—Mary L. Anhaltzer Foundation
Barbara & Donald Jonas Family Fund
Big Chief Tree Service
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Clover Stornetta Farms
Battery Powered—The Battery Foundation
The California Wellness Foundation
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Coming Clean Collaborative
Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund
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Herbert L. Strauss & Carolyn N. Strauss Trust Marin Community Foundation
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The Framing Shop ●
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Jenifer Altman Foundation
Mulcahy Consulting
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John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust
Mental Insight Foundation
Pacific Union—Christie’s International Real Estate Reflection Fund of RSF Social Finance
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Thanksgiving Gathering
van Loben Sels/RembeRock Foundation
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Bet Lev Foundation
California Breast Cancer Research Program The Canary Fund of RSF Social Financial ●
The Eaton Family Fund
Hakomi Institute of California
Kalliopeia Foundation
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Kellog/Katz Family Trust
Merrill Family Charitable Foundation
Nathan Cummings Foundation ●
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Schwab Charitable Fund ●
PayPal Giving Fund
RSF Social Finance ●
West Marin Fund
The Wyss Foundation
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MMG Foundation
New Ground Fund
Peaceful World Foundation
Samuel H. Kress Foundation
Sierra Health Foundation
The Tietz Family Foundation
Visual Understanding in Education
The Wright Gardner
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Panta Rhea Foundation
Tides Foundation
Wells Fargo Community Support Campaign
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Muriel Murch Full Circle Endowment Fund of the Marin Community Foundation
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation
Applied Materials Foundation
Distracted Globe Foundation
The Germanacos Foundation
National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health ●
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Bellwether Foundation
Calvert Social Investment Foundation
Gado Gado
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Bothin Foundation
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Community Health Charities
Mays Family Charitable Fund
Morning Glory Family Foundation
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Annie E. Casey Foundation
Boston University/NIEHS-funded Superfund Research Program
The California Endowment
Taylor Maid Farms
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Szekely Family Foundation
Tinyblue Foundation
Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation
Whidbey Island Center for the Arts
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University of California
Wallace Genetic Foundation
The Whitman Institute
and several foundations that prefer anonymity.
We offer special thanks and gratitude to the following Commonweal Friends for their generous contributions of $100 and above during the last six months. A full list of all of our donors can be found on our website under “About Us.” (Donations received after 9/30/16 will be acknowledged in the next newsletter.) Donald Abrams David Adams Judith Adams Kathryn Adams Tim Adams Carole Angermeir and Wilford Welch Benjamin Aresty Judith Arnett Justine Auchincloss Laura-Mae Baldwin Carol Banquer, MD Steven Barclay Mary and William Barror Carl Belline Julie and David Bernard Sandra Birdwell Diane Blacker and Ben Davis Penelope Bourk Bill Braash and Vera Louie Fadhilla Bradley Rita Brenner Sarah Livia Brightwood J. Stephen and Marjorie Burr Tehan Carey Andrew Carman Robert Cheatham Joy Churchman
Shelby Clark Joel Coen and Frances McDormand John Colla-Negri Mary Elizabeth Cooney Pamela J. Culp Francis Curren Karin DeSantis Catherine Dodd Robert and Diana Ekedahl Maria Ellis Kyra Epstein Erica Etelson Donald L. Fink, MD Barry Flicker Joshua Fouts and Tina Sciabica Matthew Gardner Ron and Maria Garrigues Lynn Getz Steven Gilbert Robert and Sara Giswold Sandra Glading Marilyn Goldberg Elizabeth Goldblatt Robert Gould Lindy Graham Bess Granby James Grant
William Grant Sadja Greenwood Sharon Grodin Carol and Dexter Hake Jeanne Halpern Susan and Charles Halpern Mark Hardwick Gloria Harris Jimsie Hart Sharen Heath Grant Heidrich Steve Heilig Burr Heneman Laurel Hillerson-Spear Daniel B. Hogan Ann Hogle Michele Horner Vivian Hsu Diane M. Huerta John Hunting Toril Jelter Bonnie Jones Rebecca Katz Ann H. Kim Bill and Paula Kirby Harriet Kossman Ronda Kotelchuck
Robert Kotkin Maxine Kraemer Alyse Laemmle Philip J. Landrigan, MD Elizabeth Larew Hiram Larew Mel Lefer Jill Leiner Mary Lenox Kate Levinson Andrea Lum Stephanie MacColl Betsy MacGregor and Charles Terry Daniel B. Magraw Janet Mahoney Elizabeth Mann Gene Marchi and Travis Smith Vanessa Marcotte Mindy Marin Chloe Martin Marsha Maslan Terri Mason John Mays Michele McCoskey Josephine Merck Paul Merrill Maeve Metzger
Caitlin Miller James Stewart Miller George G. Mills Mimi Mindel David and Michele Mittelman Ingrid Mittermaier Jill Moore Paul Moore Betsy Morgenthaler Kathleen Mozena Jo Muilenburg Fitzhugh Mullan, MD Elinor and Mark Mumm Stephen Myers Anita Nager Corinne Nakao Lynn Nelsen Val Nereo Sylvia Nobbmann Carolyn North Angela Eunjin Oh and Tu Ying Ming Kitty Okamura Joan Yae Okasako Anna O’Malley Jo O’Malley and Michael Brucker Shelia Opperman Martin Payne
Julien Phillips Edith Piltch Ayn and Charlie Plant Gary and Jean Pokorny Mallikarjun Posanipalli Christine Price Regan Pritzker James and Caren Quay Chad Raphael Daniel Raskin Sara Reingold Alexandra Rome Ruth Rosen Peter and Robin Rudy Chelsea Rustrum Roger and Vicki Sant Marlene Saritzky Barbara Schaetti Pamela H. Schell Ted Schettler Patty Schmidt Philip Schrodt Susannah Schroll Charles Scull and Julia Weaver Beth and Rob Setrakian Jennifer Antes Sivertson Douglas Smith William Spurgeon
Aliyah Stein and Gary Willson Kathryn Stevens Jamie Strateman Jeanne Strong Mila & Val Tarasenko Pauline Tesler and Peter Sandman Sean Thackrey Susan Tillet Cynthia Trenshaw John & Melissa Tydlaska George Viramontes Janet Visick Jeremy Waletzky, MD Francis Weller and Judith Farina Peter and Maria Wenner Canon Western Stephen Willeford Michael Witte and Barbara Kavanaugh Carol Wuebker and several anonymous donors
COMMONWEAL COMMONWEAL
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You Make Our Work Possible by Michael Lerner, President
In our 40th year, Commonweal is as self-renewing as ever. Vibrant new programs continue to emerge, like Angela Oh and Tu Ying Ming’s Gift of Compassion, and like our Power of Hope Summer Camps, bringing together an extraordinarily diverse community of campers and millennial camp counselors. At the same time, our longstanding programs in health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice are as strong as ever. Commonweal is a partnership, and you, gentle reader, are among our most important partners. So, please, in this time of critical challenge to all we care about, contribute to Commonweal’s work. On our website you can select a specific program to support, or, equally importantly, support our work as a whole. We welcome conversations with you about creative ways to contribute—something of value you no longer need—a car, real estate, and other things of worth. We especially appreciate being included in your estate planning. What matters is that your support is at the heart of what sustains Commonweal. Let’s keep the partnership strong.
Dear Commonweal Friends < continued from page 1
Holding this awareness, the endless turning tides of politics, economics, war, and all the other miseries arising from our ignorance assume their proper place. We do all we can to nudge the arc of history toward peace, justice, and a healthy planet. But whichever way history is moving, the needs of the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the prisoner do not change much. The needs of the earth do not change much. At the policy level, the advocacy level, we have always been active, and sometimes effectively so. At the level of touching the lives of individual people— children caught in juvenile justice systems, children for whom art opens a door to learning, people facing cancer and other conditions of loss—we have been good friends. The work calls us always to new efforts, new tasks, and new possibilities. Commonweal began 40 years ago in a
small coastal town. The people who live in this town are mostly white. We have done environment and justice work for 40 years and we have a strong commitment to continue to build meaningful diversity in our community. Those efforts are emerging, in projects like Visual Thinking Strategies, the Power of Hope Summer Camp, the Millennial Gatherings, and the Fall Gathering—all under Chief Strategies Officer Oren Slozberg’s aegis. We have also welcomed Angela Oh and Tu Ying Ming’s Gift of Compassion to Commonweal. Based in Los Angeles, Angela is a meditation teacher and attorney long active in justice issues. Tu is a deeply gifted artist who had a major exhibit at Commonweal last year. Angela and Tu integrate art and contemplative practice in partnership with Commonweal’s longtime friend, Orland Bishop, of the Shadetree Multicultural Foundation.
We have long served low-income communities of color in our Juvenile Justice Program, our Healing Yoga Foundation, our Biomonitoring Resource Center, our Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and more. To build diversity in our staff, we will move our work into urban centers—as we are already doing with our New York Visual Thinking Strategies office and our Houston Healing Circles program. I cannot know what the election will bring. I do know the perils of our times will not abate. Commonweal’s work— healing ourselves and healing the earth— will not change. Only the skillful means to achieve our purposes changes. Each of you who reads this letter is part of the Commonweal Community. We welcome your suggestions, your thoughts, your support, your engagement with us, and your prayers. With gratitude, Michael Lerner, President
C O M M O N W E A L ■ D E C E M B E R 2 0 16
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P. O . B o x 3 1 6 Bolinas, CA 94924
CELEBRATING
40
YEARS OF SERVICE Our work depends on the generosity of our community. Please consider a tax-deductible, end-of-year donation.
Keep up with all of our events at commonweal.org
The photographs of
PIRO PATTON
September–December 2016 at Commonweal Gallery