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Our members are familiar with many of the aspects of Clean Water Action advocacy: promoting legislation, endorsing candidates, field and phone canvassing, educational outreach.

Several of our state offices also do direct engagement with the business community to promote best practices on issues like chemical policy and waste management. Our New England offices (Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts) have been working for over a year with management at CVS Health on developing a safer chemical policy.

The Mind the Store program had been talking with CVS on this subject for a few years

On March 31st this year, Clean Water Action and the Coalition for a Safe and Healthy CT, an advocacy group that aims to protect our children from toxic chemicals, held a press event to voice concerns over the use of recycled tire rubber as a ground cover in playgrounds and urge passing of the bill to ban its use. I saw firsthand the world in which the Coalition works and learned a few things about the legislative process, the science, and the impact of simply showing up to relay my concern. Here are three things I realized:

On April 2 nd, Massachusetts lost a great leader and champion of justice and environmental health, Senator Ken Donnelly. Senator Donnelly was a firefighter of 37 years, former Secretary/Treasurer of the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts and the Senator from Massachusetts’ Fourth Middlesex District since 2009. He died of brain cancer.

As a Senator, he was best known for his advocacy on behalf of the mentally ill, union workers, and homeless families. However, he also worked hard over the years to reduce children’s and workers’ exposure to toxic chemicals. This is the capacity in