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Gary Cohen Fights to Make the Health Industry Healthier

Gary Cohen has been an activist all his life. He cofounded Health Care Without Harm out of an awareness that the environmental movement needs to merge with the health movement and the human rights movement.

“Children should have the right to be born toxic-free,” he says. “We all have the fundamental right to live in an environment that promotes health, rather than disease.”

Gary, 50, speaks with intensity and furrows his eyebrows as he describes the core values of his organization: “We are awash in chemicals in our food, our water and our land. These chemicals are linked to the plagues of our times, such as cancer, asthma and the poisoning of our food. One in two men and one in three women in the U.S. get cancer. One in six children has a learning disability. One in seven couples has infertility problems. We need to heal the environment in order to prevent diseases in our society.”

Gary grew up in New Jersey, where he ran an alternative newspaper during high school. While attending Clark University in Western Massachusetts, he became interested in politics and served as senior editor of the college paper. He started his career as a travel writer and became fascinated with Indian philosophy at a time when he felt the world was falling apart. He lived in India for two years and when he returned to the U.S., he ran into an activist friend from college.

The friend persuaded him to write a guidebook, Fighting Toxics: A Manual for Protecting Your Family, Community and Workplace. Inspired by mothers who were trying to protect their children from the dangers of toxic waste sites, he began working on environmental health issues, first as director of the National Toxics Campaign and cofounder of the Military Toxics Project. Later, he helped found a clinic to serve survivors of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India.

When he returned home in 1996, he cofounded Health Care Without Harm with the vision of a health care industry that promotes the health of people and the environment by implementing ecologically sound and healthy practices.

“We want to support the race for prevention, rather than a race for a cure. We want to promote a healthy and sustainable planet,” Gary explains. When talking with doctors, he reminds them of the Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm.” “Happily,” he says, “they are very open to expanding their understanding of this message.”

Gary has turned to standard activist techniques to accomplish some goals. For example, he marched with youths wearing gas masks in Hamtramk, Michigan, to convince the owners of high-visibility medical waste incinerators to shut them down.

These days he’s more likely to work behind the scenes or with other groups that are targeting environmental campaigns at related industries. “We are happy that the work is getting done, even if we don’t always get credit for it,” he says.

A key goal is transforming regulatory systems that dictate how much of each chemical is safe for the human body. “Now we know that tiny amounts of chemicals can have an impact on a baby in the womb and the developing infant,” Gary notes. “We need a huge transformation – a global transformation – in how society deals with chemicals as we determine the relationship between the environment and its health impacts. We need to transition to green chemistry, which means making necessary chemicals that don’t harm living beings.”

He looks for the “teachable moment” when talking with health professionals, asking them if it is possible to build a cancer unit without carcinogens, a pediatric center without products that trigger asthma or a “fast-food free” hospital kitchen. Their response is often, “Funny, we never considered that before.”

Health Care Without Harm has grown into a global coalition of 443 organizations in 52 countries working to protect health by reducing pollution in the health care industry. It has offices in Berkeley, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; Prague; Buenos Aires; and Manila. Gary manages the fundraising and strategic development, while his codirector, Anna Gilmore Hall, oversees day-to-day operations. Anna was an executive at the American Nurses Association for 14 years before she joined the organization in 2004.

As Health Care Without Harm celebrates its 10th anniversary, its successes include:

• Virtually eliminating the market for mercury-based medical equipment in the U.S. and prompting health care workers to demand safer alternatives
• Closing more than 5,000 medical waste incinerators in the U.S. and hundreds in Europe and promoting safer ways to dispose of medical waste. Incinerators are among the largest producer of dioxins in the environment. Today, fewer than 100 incinerators remain in the U.S.
• Persuading the two largest medical supply companies in the U.S. to make medical devices free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, which contributes to dioxin pollution and leaches a chemical that is toxic to the reproductive system.
• Creating a powerful market for safer medical products by getting buy-in from the top purchasing organizations in the U.S., which represent more than 70 percent of the industry’s buying power
• Developing a healthy food program for hospitals that advocates serving antibiotic-free meat and pesticide-free foods; purchasing organic, locally grown food; and planting gardens on site. Kaiser Permanente now has 25 farmer’s markets serving locally grown organic food at its medical facilities across the U.S.
• Providing waste-minimization training for hospital staff, which has led to millions of dollars in savings for the facilities
• Working with the Health Ministry in the Philippines to safely dispose of 19 million syringes during a measles vaccination campaign

Health Care Without Harm is working to expand its reach by forging international partnerships. In collaboration with the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization, it is creating a global project that will demonstrate sustainable health care waste management in Argentina, Latvia, Lebanon, India, the Philippines, Senegal and Vietnam. In Europe, it is working for safer chemical policies, and its CleanMed conference, held in the U.S. and Europe, is the world’s largest health care conference for environmentally preferable medical products and practices.

With Skoll Foundation funding, Health Care Without Harm will:

• Launch a global mercury campaign that will organize regional conferences in developing countries, provide training and mercury cleanup kits, hold mercury thermometer exchanges in the Southern Hemisphere and work with Ministries of Health to create mercury elimination programs and policies.
• Build the organization’s capacity in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Europe by establishing regional coalitions on critical topics, such as mercury, waste elimination and geographically relevant issues. These groups will serve as hubs that recruit and maintain sub-networks in their respective regions.
• Conduct geographically targeted market research to learn more about the cost and availability of safer toxic-free products and to identify trends in global market forces for health care services

Reflecting on how far the organization has come in the past decade, Gary says he believes Health Care Without Harm has awakened the health care sector to an important message: “We are the model for understanding that the health of the environment is inseparable from the health of people. We are helping to light the way.”

Health Care Without Harm’s headquarters are located at 1901 N. Moore St., Suite 509, Arlington, VA 22209; telephone: (703) 243-0056; info@hcwh.org; www.noharm.org.

RELATED FACTS

Common substances in hospitals, such as cleaning chemicals, fumes from building materials and latex gloves can trigger an asthma attack or cause the disease. Asthma is a public health crisis. The number of people with asthma in the U.S. has more than doubled during the past two decades, and asthma costs the nation $16.1 billion annually in health care, loss of work productivity and premature death.

The health care industry is responsible for 10 percent of all mercury in the environment, which accumulates in larger, predatory fish and is transferred to our bodies through a fish diet.

Antibiotic resistance is caused in part to overuse of antibiotics in agriculture.

Enthusiastic Response to PBS Grant Program

We’re delighted with the response to the first call for proposals to be considered for funding under the PBS Foundation Social Entrepreneurship Fund. More than 100 entries have been submitted to PBS so far, including proposals for 60- to 90-minute documentaries, five- to seven-minute shorts, multi-episode programming and segments for some of PBS’ signature programs. Proposals have come in from all around the globe, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and India, and include ideas for broader outreach, such as online presence, downloadable podcasts and action campaigns.

This project of the PBS Foundation and the Skoll Foundation will award $2.5 million in grants during the next three years to filmmakers, documentarians and other journalists who produce content that promotes large-scale public awareness of social entrepreneurs and the field of social entrepreneurship. PBS will distribute the finished works to its member stations.

An independent Advisory Committee comprised of thought leaders and experts in the field of social entrepreneurship is working with the PBS program team to evaluate the proposed projects. Advisory Committee members are David Bornstein, journalist and author of The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank and How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas; Sushmita Ghosh, president of Ashoka; Dr. Johanna Mair, assistant professor teaching social entrepreneurship in the MBA program at IESE in Barcelona; Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green; and Michele Jolin, senior adviser at the Center for American Progress.

Funding announcements will be made in the beginning of January by PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which jointly manage the Social Entrepreneurship Fund. Click here to view the announcement of the Social Entrepreneurship Fund. Click here to learn about eligibility requirements and guidelines.

Frontline/World Moves People to Action

Matt Flannery will never forget October 31. The cofounder and CEO of Kiva spent a busy day with his staff, adding more content to the site at www.kiva.org in preparation for the Frontline/World show that aired nationwide on PBS that evening. It is one of seven magazine-style segments about social entrepreneurs funded by the Skoll Foundation through the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston.

The story about Kiva’s online microlending efforts in Africa triggered such a response that the organization’s site crashed. But there is a happy ending to the story: Kiva celebrated Thanksgiving with the news that it had raised its 1 millionth dollar for the developing world, thanks to 13,000 users who contributed $25 at a time. Much of that funding has arrived since the Frontline/World show aired.

In return for making microloans to small African businesses listed on the site, Kiva contributors receive regular updates on the progress of the businesses they sponsor. Once their Kiva loans are repaid, lenders can choose to withdraw their funds or loan them to a new business.

You can follow along with Kiva’s adventures on Social Edge, where Matt shares the daily triumphs and tribulations that mark his journey as a social entrepreneur.

Social Edge Traffic Reaches New High

More than 22,000 unique visitors came to Social Edge during October, a new record for the Web site, where social entrepreneurs, nonprofit professionals, philanthropists and other practitioners in the social sector connect. The Social Edge weekly e-newsletter marked a milestone of its own in October, when more than 50 percent of subscribers clicked through to other content.

Among the most popular features on the site are Matt Flannery’s “Kiva Chronicles” on his online microlending experiment in Africa, live blogs from Afghanistan by Heidi Kühn of Roots of Peace, Keely Stevenson's “From Tribeca to Tanzania” descriptions of her trial-by-fire training as an Acumen Fund Fellow, Steven LaFrance’s advice on best practices for scaling up and increasing impact, and a discussion on how nonprofits are doing significant fund raising on Second Life, a virtual world with more than 1 million registered users.

Book Captures Social Entrepreneurship Learning

A new book from Oxford University Press examines the different ways social entrepreneurship is practiced by grassroots activists, nonprofits, policy makers, international institutions and corporations, and offers suggestions for developing clear frameworks for the field. Social Entrepreneurship: New Models for Sustainable Social Change, edited by Alex Nicholls, includes a preface by our founder, Jeff Skoll, and a chapter by our CEO, Sally Osberg, entitled “Wayfinding Without a Compass: Philanthropy’s Changing Landscape and Its Implications for Social Entrepreneurs.” Other contributions are from leading academics, such as Nicholls and J. Gregory Dees, as well as social entrepreneurs, including Muhammad Yunus and Bill Drayton.

The 474-page hardbound volume is available for $89.50 with free shipping on Amazon.com.

Registration to Begin Soon for Skoll World Forum

Staff members at the Skoll Centre on Social Entrepreneurship are hard at work on the program for the 2007 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, which will be held March 27-29 at Oxford University in England. This year’s theme is “Social Innovation and Diffusion.”

Spaces go quickly for this world-class gathering of social entrepreneurs and leaders in the field of social entrepreneurship. To be notified when registration opens for the conference, click here and follow the email link.