Sharon Smith: Youth Leadership
For The Environment
For the past eight years, Sharon Smith (Green Corps Class of 2000) has worked with student and youth activists on a variety of environmental campaigns. She recently joined Earth Island Institute as the director of its New Leaders Initiative. The program is designed to find and cultivate young leaders (aged 13 to 22) for the protection of the environment.

A major component of the New Leaders Initiative are the Brower Youth Awards, established in 2000 to honor David Brower and to recognize and celebrate a new generation of young leaders following in his footsteps. The Brower Youth Awards spotlight six honorees, and encourage award winners to make activism a lifelong practice.

In October, Sharon worked with alumna Marika Holmgren (Green Corps Class of 1993) of Organic Events to organize the 2007 Brower Youth Awards. The ceremony took place in the historic Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.

The event, attended by nearly 700 environmental and youth leaders, honored this year’s six award winners. They included 16-year-old Erica Fernandez, who organized her Latino community in Oxnard, California, to defeat a proposed liquefied natural gas facility, and 14-year-old Alex Lin, who helped draft and pass a statewide ordinance in Rhode Island to ban the dumping of “e-waste,” or computer waste.

Victoria Kaplan: Building People
Power To Protect Food And Water
As the Organizing Director for Food & Water Watch, Victoria Kaplan (Green Corps Class of 2005) has helped develop a team of organizers and advocates mobilizing citizens to challenge corporate control and abuse of food and water. After launching less than two years ago, Food & Water Watch has already won major victories protecting our food and water.

Victoria, along with Food & Water Watch allies across the country, was able to secure a commitment from Starbucks to stop serving milk made with the harmful artificial hormone rBGH. With more than 6,000 stores nationwide, Starbucks is a large consumer of milk. For years, Starbucks used milk from cows injected with the hormone rBGH. For humans, the problems associated with rBGH are numerous and include increased instances of several types of cancers.

Victoria’s group generated thousands of calls and e-mails from Starbucks customers and healthy food advocates to convince the corporation to serve only 100 percent hormone-free milk in all of its U.S. stores. The Starbucks victory is not the end of Victoria’s work. Food & Water Watch will next take on offshore aquaculture and water privatization.

Sincerely,

Naomi Roth
Executive Director