Jenifer Altman and Her Foundation: A Brief History

Jenifer Altman was an environmentalist, an advocate for cancer patients, a photographer, an enthusiast for the expressive arts, a New Yorker and, in her last years, a resident of the small coastal town of Bolinas, California. A gentle, intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate woman, Jenifer came to Bolinas to participate in the Commonweal Cancer Help Program after her diagnosis with cancer. She stayed in Bolinas to work with Commonweal as a Senior Research Associate and to explore every possible approach, both conventional and complementary, to living as long and as well as she could with her life-threatening illness. She died in Bolinas in a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean surrounded by friends on November 15, 1991. She had been born in New York on October 28, 1941. We had just celebrated her fiftieth birthday.

When Jenifer knew she was dying, she called me over to her house and asked if I would help her create a foundation with her estate that would support Commonweal as long as it continued to be a significant contributor to the public good and would also engage in other good work in the world. With good legal counsel, Jenifer succeeded in creating the Jenifer Altman Foundation before her death. She asked me to serve as President of the Foundation, and to name a Board that would govern the work of the Foundation.

Let us talk for a moment of ultimate things. Jenifer was fifty years old when she died. Like so many others, she died before her time. Cancer is epidemic in our time. So are many other diseases in which disruptions of the environment are known or strongly suspected of playing a significant role.

It is no secret that we as humans are not alone on this earth in suffering from epidemic conditions leading to premature deaths. We are living, scientists tell us, in an Age of Extinctions, the fifth great spasm of planetary dying, in which we are driving the sacred tree of life, biodiversity, back to its lowest level of vitality since the end of the Age of Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Scientists tell us that climate change, ozone depletion, toxic chemicals and habitat destruction are four of the leading drivers of this Age of Extinctions. This Age of Extinctions does not lead to sickness and to death for just fish and birds and whales and polar bears and other creatures great and small. It is affecting us as well.

It is not a bad thing, we believe, to focus our grantmaking on efforts to end this Age of Extinctions and to help bring the birth of a new Age of Interbeing, to borrow an expression from the great Buddhist teacher and activist Thich Nhat Hanh, in which a deep consciousness of the interdependence of all life will fundamentally transform the primitive death-dealing technologies that we thoughtlessly deploy today into fully conscious technologies that support and sustain the tree of life rather than weaken it. This will require, unquestionably, a deep transformation in human consciousness and human activity on the earth. But it is no greater a transformation that the previous evolutionary steps our species has taken that ended slavery, brought about the great public health revolution of the 19th century that contained infectious disease epidemics, led us from the age of monarchies to the age of democracies, and created the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, the women's movement, the human rights movement, the gay rights movement and the environmental justice movement, to name just a few of the consciousness- transforming movements of our time.

Our focus at the Jenifer Altman Foundation is one tiny molecule of the first fruit of this Age of Extinctions in which we live -- the first global movement to address the great cataclysm of human and ecological health directly. We believe that we are witnessing an emerging environmental health movement, which bids fare to make environmental health one of the great human rights issues of the 21st century. The right of women, for example, to gestate and give birth to babies toxics-free, in a world where breast milk is no longer the most toxic human food, is, we believe, a very fundamental human right. Women, knowing that breast milk is (and even with its toxic content remains) the best food for babies, should not have to face the fact that this most sacred human act of nourishing their babies with the milk of their breast is also transferring, especially to their first born, much of their lifetime load of toxic chemicals.

We believe, not coincidentally, that the emerging environmental health movement will be led to a significant degree by women. We believe that the global women's movement, along with health affected groups, environmentalists, labor groups, health professionals, faith-based groups, activists concerned with toxics in every industrial sector, and indigenous and environmental justice groups, are among its principle founders.

I have taken Jenifer's request to serve as President of the Jenifer Altman Foundation as a great act of trust, and I have tried to be as faithful to that trust as I can be. Jenifer's family, including her mother Celeste Bartos, her stepfather Armand Bartos, her brothers Jonathan Altman and Adam Bartos, and her cousins the late Peter Ungerleider and Jeannie Ungerleider, have all been greatly supportive of Jenifer's wishes and of the work of the Foundation. Celeste Bartos has contributed generously to the Foundation, increasing the scope of its work. Celeste is a deeply gifted philanthropist in her own right, who has made major contributions to the arts and sciences, especially the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the New York Public Library, over many years. Jonathan Altman served on the Foundation Board during its early years and made a great contribution to its development.

Philanthropy is a surprisingly difficult craft to practice well, and the learning curve for any intelligent practitioner remains sharp for as long as one remains a practitioner. For the time being, until we learn a better approach, we have settled on the emerging environmental health movement as our core concern and grassroots-based, market-oriented campaigns to reduce the impact of technologies that threaten biodiversity and human health as our principle methodology.

We owe a great debt to our colleagues in the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, the Health and Environmental Funders Network, the Environmental Grantmakers Association, Grantmakers in Health, and many other formal and informal grantmaker working groups who share our commitment to grantmaking at the interface between health and the environment.

Michael Lerner
President
January, 2005