Dear Climate Health Now Community,

Welcome and we hope you are all staying healthy and well during this stage of the COVID pandemic. We know many of you are facing new challenges with clinical work, childcare, and concern -- we are with you.

We are thrilled that despite everything going on, about 40 people attended our January monthly community meeting. If you missed it, the recording is here.

We are two years into CHN's existence and focusing on creating a sustainable, transparent, and inclusive democratic structure with an explicit policy platform and clear goals we will work together to achieve through community organizing. At our meeting we proposed 4 strategic areas of work as a starting point:

  • Where we practice: advocating for decarbonization of the healthcare sector in California.
  • Within our medical organizations and societies: working to compel organized medical associations like California Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and regional medical societies to lobby for climate legislation and regulations in California.
  • In the media, public venues and within our medical communities: leveraging our voices as trusted messengers to communicate that climate change is a health emergency and the enormous health co-benefits of climate action – to boost political will for action.
  • In our communities: in partnership for climate justice with community-based and environmental justice groups, including legislative and regulatory advocacy.

Please find more detail here, including our mission, proposed vision and theory of change.
 
As we mentioned at our meeting, we are at the very beginning of this process of building our foundation-- and there is a lot of work ahead. We need feedback and input from our members – and collaboration. 

This Winter and early Spring, we are planning a Listening Campaign– in which we build a team of CHN members to engage with as many of our 522 members as possible to hear what resonates with you about these 4 areas of work, and what doesn’t.  

Our Listening Campaign will be woven into our statewide membership structure building process in a way that creates a solid foundation for the years ahead - including the creation of bylaws, explicit decision-making processes, and self-governance. We are planning to work with a team of organizational development consultants for this process as well. There will be lots of opportunities for you to engage with colleagues and we sincerely hope you will link arms with us in this pivotal process to be part of crafting our strategic plan for impact.  

Lastly, we will be working hard to resource our vision of all health professionals in California being involved in the climate movement as a part of our professional duty. We’ve never done it before, but this year we are going to fundraise! We know our impact will be exponentially greater with some staff to enable our members to act effectively together. Our aspiration is to fundraise $225,000 by June 1st to support our own continued work on CHN in an intentional and sustainable way as well as to fund a part or full-time Membership Associate. When the stakes are as high as they are, and our voices can do so much to build the social and political will for the climate action we need – we’ve decided it’s time to give this our all.  

We could not be more honored to be leading this amazing community of health professionals who are ready to use their voices to call for healing our communities with a Just Transition from dirty oil and gas to clean, renewable energy in California. This is going to be an incredible year and we can’t wait to collaborate in bending the arc of history towards climate justice with you.

In solidarity,
Ashley McClure & Amanda Millstein