It is our birthday. SEHN is 25! Please celebrate with us. These milestones give us an occasion to look back on the highlights and the stand-out moments of our little power-house organization. What have we achieved and what lies ahead? In this missive we share with you our retrospective. Short version: all of our accomplishments were done in partnership, with you our donors and supporters, coalitions we worked with, government agencies and grassroots groups.
Perhaps our most notable achievement was developing the precautionary principle into a robust policy tool. Ted Schettler, our physician on staff, laid the groundwork for this. As one reporter said , "Talking with Dr. Ted Schettler is probably unlike any conversation you have had with your physician. Raise the topic of breast cancer or diabetes or dementia, and Schettler starts talking about income disparities, industrial farming, and campaign finance reform.” She goes on to say that Ted, "frustrated by the limitations of science in combating disease, believes that finding answers to the most persistent medical challenges of our time—conditions that now threaten to overwhelm our health care system—depends on understanding the human body as a system nested within a series of other, larger systems: one’s family and community, environment, culture, and socioeconomic class, all of which affect each other….”
A few years ago, the American Public Health Association gave me the Homer N. Calver award for our work on the precautionary principle because it was a decision-making tool that exemplified the public health ethic of preventing harm and suffering in the face of scientific uncertainty.
When I was handed the glass sculpture I passed it around the room and invited everyone to leave their fingerprints on it because it was really an award to all of us. Every single person who had worked to show the links between toxic chemicals and cancer or birth defects, every organization that had worked to protect future generations from a legacy of environmental degradation, every grassroots group that had fought to protect their community, won that award with me.
I want to thank each of you for your support—financial, intellectual and emotional. Your fingerprints are all over our achievements.
Will you join with us in the work ahead? We are planning ambitious projects to take what we learned over the past 25 years, and co-create a resilient, healthy, beautiful future. Are you in?
Enclosed with this letter is a short magazine of our work over the past 25 years that gives a small taste of our ambitious and bold project that builds on all we’ve learned in the past two and a half decades. I also introduce you to our staff and board so you know who you are supporting.
