Please click here to learn more about nominating a HEFN Steering Committee member.

HEFN's 2011 steering committee is led by co-chairs Earl Lui and Sarah Vogel.  The Steering Committee members include:

Beto Bedolfe,  Marisla Foundation

Mr. Bedolfe has focused on international biodiversity conservation, protection of the marine environment, environmental health, and Southern California social issues since 1992.    He is a founding member of HEFN and a member of its Steering Committee.

Prior to his current responsibilities, Mr. Bedolfe directed programs for the U.S. Agency for International Development, primarily in West and Southern Africa.  He has lived in the Cape Verde Islands and Mozambique, and implemented short-term assignments in Guinea Bissau and Sao Tome-Principe.  From 1977 – 80, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Paraguay.

Beto is a member of the board of directors of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association (SIMA) Environment Fund and also serves as the chair of the Oceana board of directors.   Previously he was a board member and treasurer of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity.  

Ellen Dorsey, Wallace Global Fund

Ellen Dorsey has 25 years' experience promoting international human rights, particularly economic and social rights, and advocating for environmental justice. She is the Executive Director of the Wallace Global Fund, a private foundation located in Washington, DC, that focuses on environmental sustainability, corporate accountability, human rights, and civic participation.

Dorsey came to the Fund from The Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she led initiatives on environmental health and green economic development.  She has served on the board of numerous non-profit organizations promoting human rights and sustainable development, including serving as chair of the board of Amnesty International USA. 

Dorsey has a doctorate in political science from the University of Pittsburgh, was selected as a Fulbright Research Fellow in South Africa, and has served on the faculty of several Universities. She has lectured and written extensively on effective strategies of non-governmental organizations and social movements. Most recently, Dorsey is co-author, with Paul J. Nelson, of New Rights Advocacy: Changing Strategies of Development and Human Rights NGOs, published in 2008 by Georgetown University Press.

Tina Eshaghpour, The Women’s Foundation of California

Tina Eshaghpour is Senior Program Advisor to the Women’s Foundation of California and consults on environmental health and justice issues for other foundations.  She has led the Women’s Foundation's environmental health and justice program since 2002 first as program officer and now as a consultant. She is the author of "Confronting Toxic Contamination in Our Communities: Women’s Health and California's Future," a seminal report on women's environmental health in California. Tina has a background in public health, social marketing, immigrant and refugee health and environmental justice. She is a graduate of the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs and has a master’s degree in public health from UCLA. Tina co-chairs HEFN's Women’s Environmental Health working group and serves on the HEFN-CA advisory board.  She recently joined the board of the Center on Environmental Health.  Tina’s passion about the intersection of environmental and reproductive justice is fueled by her two young children.

Ruth Hennig, John Merck Fund

Ruth Hennig is the executive director of The John Merck Fund, which she joined as the foundation’s first staff member in 1988, the year that climate change began to get sustained media attention.  In addition to management responsibilities, she functions as the director of the Environment Program.  Prior to joining the foundation, Ruth was on the Conservation Law Foundation’s senior staff.  Ruth chairs the board of SmartPower, which is attempting to build markets for clean energy across the country, and was a founding advisory committee member of the New England Grassroots Environment Fund.  She was instrumental in creating both organizations. 

Ruth has served the environmental foundation community in several roles.  She was a board member of the Beldon Fund and is currently a member of the Health and Environment Funders Network steering committee.  She is a past member of the management committees for the Environmental Grantmakers Association and the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity.

Pat Jenny, New York Community Trust

Patricia Jenny is Program Director, Community Development and Environment, managing environment and workforce development grants programs at The New York Community Trust, New York City’s community foundation.  The environment program includes a national focus, supporting efforts across the country to address climate change, environmental health, and habitat protection.  Our New York City environment grants target urban environmental issues, including solid waste management, development of open space and parks, waterfront and brownfield reclamation, and air pollutants and other toxins. Ms. Jenny leads a regional funders’ collaborative promoting sustainable transportation policies and transportation oriented development in the tri-state metropolitan area. Ms. Jenny also manages grantmaking on citywide employment issues as well as a philanthropic collaborative focused on improving the system of workforce services for New York City job seekers.

From 1993 to 2001, Ms. Jenny served as the director of the Neighborhood Strategies Project, a multi-year effort to expand economic opportunities for residents of Washington Heights, Mott Haven in the Bronx, and Williamsburg in Brooklyn.    Ms. Jenny also served as a senior program officer at The Trust from 1983 to 1992, responsible for the Community Development and Environment grant programs.  Prior to that, she worked as a consultant in community development public policy in California and Washington, DC. 

She holds a Masters in Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a B.A. degree in History from Brown University.  Ms. Jenny serves on the boards of Cause Effective in New York City, the Health and Environmental Funders Network, and is a founding board member of the Montclair Economic Development Corporation in New Jersey. 

Mary Tyler Johnson, Johnson Family Foundation

Mary Tyler Johnson, MPA, MPH is an environmental health consultant focused on the links between exposures to environmental toxicants and a variety of health outcomes in women and girls. Mary is on the boards of the Johnson Family Foundation (JFF), the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH), and the Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN).

Mary holds a Master of Public Health and a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University in New York, New York. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Mary and her husband, Jesse Johnson, live in New York City.

Phil Johnson, Heinz Endowment  

Philip Johnson is a senior officer with the Endowments’ Environment Program.  

Philip joined the Endowments in February 2009 while completing a doctorate in environmental health and risk management at Yale University. He has two master’s degrees from Yale, one in environmental science and the other in public health, and received an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Northwestern University in 1991. 

Outside of academics, Philip has worked for government agencies and nonprofits on air and water pollution issues. He founded the nonprofit Air Intelligence, a Washington state-based organization that provided scientific and legal expertise to communities facing serious contamination issues. He also worked for the U.S. National Park Service on salmon fisheries restoration in the Pacific Northwest. 

Before beginning his doctoral work, Philip was a senior scientist and program manager for the Boston-based nonprofit, NESCAUM, which provides scientific analysis and policy advising to the air-quality agencies of the eight Northeastern states. His memberships include the American Public Health Association and the Society for Risk Analysis. 

Heeten Kalan, New World Foundation

Heeten Kanti Kalan, a South African, currently works for the New World Foundation in New York City as their Senior Program Officer for Environmental Justice.  At the New World Foundation, he runs the Global Environmental Health and Justice Fund.  He also has responsibilities with the New Majority Fund at New World.  He works closely with many South African environmental justice organizations; and since the fall of the apartheid regime, his activism has centered on heightening awareness of the links between the environment and all aspects of health and the broader socio-economic consequences of unjust environmental policies.

Earl Lui, The California Wellness Foundation

Earl Lui is a program director at The California Wellness Foundation (TCWF), assigned to grantmaking related to environmental health and work and health. His responsibilities include reviewing letters of interest and grant proposals and making funding recommendations related to those health issues.

Prior to joining the Foundation in December 2006, he was senior attorney at Consumers Union’s West Coast Office in San Francisco, focusing on health care advocacy since 2000.  From 1993 to 2000, he worked on financial services advocacy for Consumers Union. Prior to that, he was an associate trainer for Coro Northern California, a leadership training program; a staff attorney for Homebase (Public Advocates, Inc.); and an associate with the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro.

Lui is currently co-chair of the steering committee for the Health and Environmental Funders Network, California Working Group. A member of the State Bar of California, he earned his law degree from the University of Michigan and his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Pete Myers, Jenifer Altman Foundation

John Peterson Myers is founder, CEO and Chief Scientist of Environmental Health Sciences. Pete Myers holds a doctorate in the biological sciences from the UC Berkeley and a BA from Reed College. For a dozen years beginning in 1990, Myers served as Director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia. Along with co-authors Dr. Theo Colborn and Dianne Dumanoski, Myers wrote Our Stolen Future, a book (1996) that explores the scientific basis of concern for how contamination threatens fetal development. He has published the website OurStolenFuture.org since that book was published, synthesizing hundreds of scientific articles about endocrine disruption to make them accessible to the media and the lay public.

Myers is now actively involved in primary research on the impacts of endocrine disruption on human health. He is on the boards of the John Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, the Environmental Grantmakers Association, and the Jenifer Altman Foundation.  Until its merger with Pew Charitable Trust in late 2007, he served as Board Chair of the National Environmental Trust. He has also served as Board President of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, an association of 40+ foundations supporting work on biodiversity, climate, energy and environmental health.

Anita Nager,  Jenifer Altman Foundation   

Anita Nager was the last Executive Director of the Beldon Fund, an intentional spend-out foundation, dedicated to building and sustaining a national consensus to achieve and sustain a healthy planet, and served for seven years as its Director of Programs. The Beldon Fund, founded and chaired by John Hunting, a Steelcase heir, invested its entire principal and earnings over a ten-year period.  Anita guided the final spend out, communication of lessons learned, and the conclusion of operations.  When the Beldon Fund closed its doors in May 2009, it had allocated more than $120 million in grants and foundation directed projects.

Prior to Beldon, Anita was a Senior Program Officer for Community Development and the Environment at The New York Community Trust where she designed a grantmaking strategy for a $100 million fund focused on national environmental issues.  

A former Board Chair of the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers, Anita also is a past board member of the Neighborhood Funders Group and the Environmental Grantmakers Association.  She was a founding board member of Cause Effective, which provides management and resource development assistance to nonprofit organizations, and a founder of the AIDS and Adolescents Network of New York.

Anita is a trustee of the Hudson River Foundation and chairs the Advisory Board of its New York City Environment Fund, providing environmental stewardship grants to grassroots organizations.  She is a founder and current co-chair of the Health and Environment Funders Network, and serves as a trustee of the Jenifer Altman Foundation.

Anita was recognized by the Breast Cancer Fund at their 2008 Heroes Tribute for her “philanthropic leadership and nurturance of the environmental health movement” and by West Harlem Environmental Action in 2009 with its We Act for Environmental Justice 30th Anniversary Award.  

Sarah Vogel, Johnson Family Foundation

Sarah Vogel joined the Johnson Family Foundation in January of 2009.  She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2008.  Her dissertation, The Politics of Plastics: the economic, political and scientific history of bisphenol A, details the development of chemical policy in the United States from the 1950s to the present. She holds Master’s degrees in public health and environmental management from Yale University.  Prior to graduate school, Sarah worked for the W. Alton Jones Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Michael Lerner, HEFN's Chair Emeritus, Jenifer Altman Foundation

Michael Lerner is president of the Jenifer Altman Foundation and the Barbara Smith Fund.  He is also president of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California, and of Smith Farm Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, D.C.  He is co-founder of HEFN, the Collaborative for Health and the Environment, Health Care Without Harm, the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, and The New School at Commonweal.  He is the author of "Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer," (MIT)  and other essays.