HEFN

The mission of Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE) is to eliminate toxic chemicals that impact women’s health by changing consumer behaviors, corporate practices and government policies.  As a proactive response to the mainstream environmental movement, which by and large failed to include women in leadership positions and did not recognize the systemic connections between health, class, race, and the environment, WVE was born by a group of visionary women leaders in Missoula, Montana in 1995. 

WVE’s initial goal was to create a model women's organization that would effectively address leading environmental issues while creating opportunities for women to be agents for social change.  For the first ten years of operation, WVE conducted state-based work in Montana, organizing women to fight local polluting facilities such as pulp mills, incinerators, and cement kilns, as well as hard rock mines and large-scale pesticide spraying.  In 2004, recognizing our unique niche in bridging the women’s, public health and environmental movements, WVE expanded its reach to women nationally.  Today, WVE is focusing its work on eliminating toxic pollution that may be contributors to breast cancer, birth defects, asthma, infertility, learning disabilities, children's cancers and other illnesses. We aim to eliminate sources of toxic chemicals from consumer products, homes, workplaces, and communities.

Key Programs and Impact

WVE’s Safe Cleaning Products Initiative is designed to reduce a woman's exposure to toxic chemicals by removing potentially harmful chemicals in household cleaning products and labeling all product ingredients. Our successes include:

·       Convincing corporate giants Clorox, SC Johnson and Son (Windex), and Procter and Gamble (Tide) to remove reproductive toxins from their products;

·       Working with Representative Israel (D-NY) to draft the federal Cleaning Products Right to Know Act of 2011, requiring all cleaning products – household and institutional use - to list ingredients on the product label;

·       Providing more than 50,000 individuals with critical information about the health impacts of cleaning product chemicals through five reports, available in English and Spanish. These publications have resulted in more than 600 press stories on the issue, reaching millions of people through news outlets such as “Good Morning America,” The New York Times, Ebony, the LA Times, Univision, and many more; and

·       Reaching more than 15,000 women in their homes through the creation of the Green Cleaning Party Kit (in English and Spanish), a tool to educate and activate women on toxic chemicals in cleaning products by providing recipes for non-toxic cleaning alternatives and local, state and national advocacy actions to promote safer cleaners.

WVE is a founding member of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (www.safecosmetics.org), a national coalition working to protect the health of consumers and workers by requiring the beauty industry to phase out the use of chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects and other health problems, and replace them with safer alternatives.  WVE’s distinct role in the Campaign has been bringing worker’s health, safety and rights into the national campaigns and policy discussions.  Successes of this effort include:

·       Working with legislators to introduce the federal Safe Cosmetics Act of 2011. WVE successfully advocated for workers’ rights provisions to be included in the bill;

·       Convincing OPI Inc., the largest global manufacturer of nail salon products, to eliminate the “toxic trio” chemicals (toluene, formaldehyde, and dibutyl phthalate) from their nail polishes; and

·       Moving Johnson & Johnson to reformulate their baby shampoo to remove formaldehyde.

Founded in 2007, by WVE, the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, and the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, the National Healthy Nail and Beauty Salon Alliance (www.nailsalonalliance.org) works to increase the health, safety, and rights of salon workers by reducing toxic chemical exposure and engaging in strategic movement building, policy advocacy, and media efforts. The Alliance is a national network comprised of scientific researchers, academics, advocates spanning the reproductive justice, environmental justice, public health, Asian Pacific Islander, and workers’ rights movements, and allies in government agencies.  Some of our successes include:

·       Successfully advocating for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue a Hazard Alert to salons about dangerous hair straightening products that contain formaldehyde;

·       Organizing a congressional briefing on toxic exposures in salons to urge support for federal legislation that would result in safer salon products, and to enable two nail salon workers and one hair stylist to travel to Washington, DC to share their personal stories; and

·       Developing a set of recommendations for federal agencies to improve salon worker health and safety and forming a standing interagency working group with OSHA, FDA, the EPA, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that meets quarterly to forward the recommendations.

WVE is unique in our field because we are the only organization that applies a specific gender analysis to our work, addressing health problems that women face as a result of toxic chemical exposure, and because a core operating principle of WVE is to build alliances with organizations that represent communities of women who are disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination and who are under-represented in government and in the mainstream environmental movement.  To this end, WVE seeks to strengthen the environmental movement by increasing its gender, racial, ethnic, and class diversity.  In practice, this has resulted in unique and strong partnerships, as outlined above, with a tremendous impact.