HEFN offers its members the opportunity to bring one field partner as your guest to HEFN’s 2018 annual meeting. We request that the Environmental Health and Justice Field Partner that your organization invites will:
- Represent a group that your organization is financially supporting; and
- Represent communities of color, low-income communities, women, indigenous or young people, or other groups highly impacted by environmental health and justice problems.
This opportunity is one of many actions flowing from HEFN’s 10-year strategic plan to mobilize philanthropy to accelerate solutions for environmental health and justice. Bringing more field partners into the annual meeting reflects the strategic plan’s focus on:
- Ensuring those impacted have a meaningful voice in decision making;
- Helping funders understand major environmental health and justice problems;
- Increasing grants to grassroots organizing and efforts led by people of color, low-income people, and young people; and
- Supporting a more powerful leadership base for environmental health and justice.
It also is an opportunity to strengthen the racial diversity of environmental health and justice philanthropy’s convenings, while we work towards strengthening the racial diversity of HEFN’s membership.
This 2018 meeting move is a pilot, with aims of enriching learning, building relationships, and expanding collaboration opportunities at our annual meeting. The HEFN Steering Committee and staff will consider feedback from all participants in the 2018 meeting in making decisions about whether to continue the field partner opportunity at future events.
Logistics—What does this mean for you as a member?
This opportunity is limited to current HEFN members.
Each member organization is allowed to bring ONE (1) person as their Field Partner to the 2018 HEFN Annual Meeting. Your Field Partner will be identified at the meeting as connected with your organization. It is your responsibility to cover the costs associated with your partner’s participation at the meeting (including their registration fee, travel, and lodging), as well as to work with your partner to determine the logistics of handling these costs.
Field Partners may be registered at the HEFN member rate.
The Field Partners do not need to participate in the same site visits or any breakout sessions as their funder partners. Certain events at the annual meeting may be marked on the agenda as funder only and not open to participation by Field Partners.
HEFN’s iron-clad no-pitch rules will be in place at the annual meeting as always.
We hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity to bring valuable voices into our community. We encourage you to carefully consider those you work with in the hope of identifying an Environmental Health and Justice Field Partner whose participation in the HEFN 2018 Annual Meeting would both be of benefit to their own leadership and bring benefit to the HEFN community.
Please email cglass@hefn.org with questions and look for field partner registration to open this fall. Click here to learn more about and register for the HEFN 2018 Annual Meeting, "The Environmental Health and Justice Majority: Raising Voices, Building Power."