About Clean New York

• What Others Say about Clean New York
• Women and the Environment
• Women's Unique Vulnerability
• Women as Advocates
• The Women of Clean New York
• Women's Voices for the Earth

Women and the Environment

Women, in part because of our traditional role as family caregivers, have been at the forefront of environmental health and justice advocacy for generations. In too many cases, we have done so on a shoestring budget on top of our many other responsibilities, and with little support from established conservation groups.

Clean New York supports women of all ages from all walks of life advocating on our own behalf for environmental health protection. We are reaching out to women-led and -oriented organizations across the state to educate and activate the enormous untapped potential of this key constituency. While harm to our natural environment affects all of us, women and children bear the brunt of these health impacts.

Women's Unique Vulnerability

The chemical industry has churned out over 26 million chemicals – over eighty thousand commonly used in commerce – but only a fraction have ever been tested for human health risks; even fewer for the full range of possible effects. Despite their greater impact on women and children, chemical testing focuses on how they affect healthy adult white men.

Women have a higher percentage of body fat, where persistent bioaccumulative toxic chemicals (or PBTs) build up. For example, women had much higher levels of phthalates – a group of chemicals linked to birth defects (Center for Disease Control, 2000). Our breast milk routinely contains such high levels of a myriad of synthetic chemicals that, if bottled for sale, it would not pass FDA regulations.

Women as Advocates

Women are still the lead decision makers when it comes to our families' homes and health, including our food, body care products, cleaning agents, and other purchases. We know that issues like these interest, concern, and motivate women as agents for social, market and political change.

In surveys, women consistently rate the environment as one of their greatest concerns, in numbers greater than men, and regardless of their political party affiliation. Yet, women’s voices remain largely absent from the decision-making structure on environmental protection, including natural resource management, conservation, and environmental health. Women have tremendous untapped potential for advocacy and political influence.

Clean New York: Protecting Women's Health and the Environment

As women, and as mothers of daughters, we have worked for a combined three decades for environmental health and justice. We have a personal and professional stake in building a future that honors women and girls and their health. We love our husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, and male friends and colleagues, but women still must contend with ongoing, overlapping social barriers including sexism and racism as well as the biological reality of increases susceptibility to harm from environmental exposures.

That's why Clean New York is committed to empowering all women to be strong voices for change. We serve to demonstrate to policymakers, opinion leaders and businesses that women’s decisions – whether political or economic – are tied to support for environmental ethics, responsibility, health and justice.

Kathleen A. Curtis, Policy Director

Kathy Curtis has eighteen years of organizing experience in NY’s environmental health movement. A recent thirteen-year veteran of Citizens' Environmental Coalition (CEC), where she served as Executive Director for four years, Kathy is a widely recognized leader within New York’s environmental health community and nationally. She co-founded the State Alliance for Federal Reform of Chemical Policy (SAFER), and worked closely with the NYS Legislature and other elected officials, achieving numerous environmental health legislative successes. She co-leads the Coming Clean Collaborative’s Policy Workgroup, where she was among the early drafters of the Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals (louisvillecharter.org). Prior to CEC, she was Outreach Director at Environmental Planning Lobby (now Environmental Advocates of NY). She lives in Rotterdam, NY where she serves on the Rotterdam Conservation Advisory Council, and recently achieved passage of a PBT-Free Purchasing Resolution. She has four children: Adam, Amber, Shannon and Vannessa and a step-daughter Rachel.

Roberta Chase Wilding, MS, Organizing Director

Bobbi Chase Wilding has nine years of experience in the environmental health movement, including a year at NYPIRG and eight with CEC, where she advanced through field manager, intern, and CEC’s first Program Associate to be Associate Director for the last four years. She co-leads the Fenceline Action Workgroup of the Coming Clean Collaborative, where she recently coordinated the northeast leg of the Environmental Justice for All tour. She developed the interactive-map-based www.ecoTHREATNY.org, wrote Environmentally Safe Hospitals: A Resource Guide for New York City Hospital Materials and Waste Managers, Environmental Racism in New York State (which included maps demonstrating the disproportionate impact of pollution on communities of color), and co-authored Building Green without Going in the Red: A Household Guide to Healthy, Affordable Building Materials. Bobbi received her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science, and her master’s degree in Ecological Economics, Values and Policy, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She lives in Cobleskill, NY, where she is Vice President of Citizens for a Clean Environment. She has one daughter, Ananda.

Clean New York - A Project of Women's Voices for the Earth

Clean New York is a project of Women's Voices for the Earth (WVE) This partnership creates an opportunity to enhance important work at the intersection of the environmental health and justice movements in the eastern and western parts of the United States. As a project of WVE, Clean New York provides a strategic vehicle for cultivating new financial and programmatic opportunities for the organization's growth and development on a national level. At the same time, WVE enables Clean New York to pursue important state-based campaigns designed to empower women to advocate on their own behalf for improved public health policies.

Women's Voices for the Earth (WVE) is a national grassroots environmental justice organization. Their mission is to empower women, who historically have had little power in affecting environmental policy, to create an ecologically sustainable and socially just society.

WVE works regionally and nationally to eliminate and/or substantially reduce environmental toxics impacting human health, and to increase women's participation in environmental decision-making. Current WVE projects include a Mercury and Reproductive Justice Campaign to ban the sale, use and disposal of mercury products in Montana; a Safe Cosmetics Campaign to protect the health and welfare of women working in the salon industry; and providing women across the country with technical and organizing support to address toxics issues in their local communities.