Your Support for Our Work
December 12, 2017 | Uncategorized |
At a time when safeguards to protect human health are under outrageous attack, your support for our work will turn into impressive wins, just like it did this year.
You will fight for the health of children with asthma and allergies that are potentially life threatening, and kids with learning disabilities that put them at a lifetime of disadvantage . . . For baby boys born with birth defects associated with testicular cancer, prostate cancer, and difficulty in fathering a child . . . For first responders exposed to dangerous gasses when toxic chemicals burn, who die from cancer in record high numbers.
You will fight for environmental justice—in rural communities where children and families drink arsenic-contaminated well water, in low-income communities where retailers sell toxic-chemical-laced food and products, and in economically challenged communities where the lack of good jobs contributes to poor health.
We will put every penny of your gift to essential, effective use. You are fueling an expanding, energized movement fighting to eliminate health-wrecking toxic chemical exposure and protect those most vulnerable to harm: babies and children, men and women who want to be parents, and pregnant women.
The impact of your support for environmental health work is no less than this: you improve the quality of life and health for millions of children and families.
At this time last year, people warned us. They felt heartsick that we faced a frightening, frustrating time. And they were absolutely right.
Yet, predictions we would fail were wrong, because people underestimated the power of organizing the grassroots. In this “impossible” year, we didn’t give up—and grassroots leaders stepped up. We worked with them, side by side, making phone calls, organizing car pools, meeting with legislators. We started early and worked into the night. It was “sooo not easy,” as one of our young folks said.
But it worked.
In Maine, we made more environmental health progress than in any other year in recent memory. Lawmakers overcame the governor’s spiteful vetoes with strong, bipartisan votes for two safe drinking water laws and a law creating a first-in-the-nation ban on toxic chemical flame retardants in upholstered furniture such as couches.
Nationally? We launched a food fight! The news went coast-to-coast viral when our tests found toxic chemicals in packaged macaroni and cheese and other cheese products. That was the start of our national consumer-organizing campaign to eliminate toxic chemicals in food, from processing and packaging materials.
At the federal level, we joined lawsuits and ongoing advocacy to stop sickening leadership appointments and other action at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that would stifle hard won progress for public health and environmental protection.
Your financial support empowers a small organization that makes big things happen. You help build unifying strategizes to counter agendas that are anti science and anti public health. You support common-sense solutions for the common good.
With you, we’ll keep fighting for what’s right and what works.
Please make a tax-deductible gift before December 31. Or, if giving monthly helps you make the gift you wish to, please join our indispensible group of monthly sustainers.
Please make the most significant contribution you can to our work in 2018. You can continue turning outrage into accomplishment. Thank you for your investment.
Yours, in health,
Michael E. Belliveau
Executive Director