Rainforest Alliance and Hershey Focus On Responsible Cocoa Community Programs

The Rainforest Alliance is teaming up with the Hershey Company to expand and accelerate programmes to improve conditions in cocoa communities in West Africa. According to Hershey, U.S. consumers will be able to purchase Hershey’s Bliss products with 100 percent cocoa from Rainforest Alliance-certified farms later this year.

Rainforest Alliance Certified farms have met comprehensive sustainability standards that protect the environment and ensure the safety and well-being of workers and their families, as well as communities. While working with farmers to improve agricultural practices, Hershey and the Rainforest Alliance will also prepare them for the future by using training programs to reduce child labor and increase school attendance.

“We support Hershey's comprehensive approach to sustainability, through educating cocoa farmers on best practices and improving conditions for cocoa farming communities in West Africa,” said Tensie Whelan, President of Rainforest Alliance. “We are thrilled to be working with Hershey to bring their sustainability commitments to life, from cocoa farms in West Africa to store shelves across North America.”

Bill McKibben and the Keystone Decision

For those of you following the progress (or glorious lack thereof) of the Keystone XL Pipeline, blogged about here last Wednesday after President Obama's statement, you may have felt the sweetness of victory tempered by the President's lukewarm reasoning for denying the application. Without explicitly mentioning the devastating environmental impacts of tar sands oil extraction, without mentioning the millions of industry dollars lining the pockets (and weighting the opinions) of Republican representatives pushing for the Keystone deal, without mentioning the vulnerable habitats that would have been affected by the positioning of the pipeline, the President's statement placed the blame squarely on timing. From a reading of the statement, with no background on the issue, a novice would chalk the application denial up to bad scheduling rather than bad practice.

"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline," says Obama's statement, "but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people."

While happy with the end result, many environmentalists remain trepidatious, worrying that the real reasons thousands circled the White House in protest last November have been glossed over.

Meanwhile Bill McKibben, founder of Overbrook grantee 350.org and a central rallying voice behind the Keystone protesters, is not resting on his laurels. A great profile by writer Barbara Moran in yesterday's Boston Globe goes behind the scenes with McKibben, and a piece in the Huffington Post by McKibben himself from earlier this month portray a soft-spoken, inadvertent leader who has his facts straight. In the Huffington Post piece, McKibben expertly links oil industry subsidies, campaign finance and the Chamber of Commerce to the climate crisis.

WITNESS's Obscura Camera

Overbrook grantee WITNESS, a human rights organization promoting the use of video advocacy, has sent us information about media coverage of their new video technologies to assist human rights defenders and civilian journalists in documenting human rights abuses. In partnership with The Guardian Project, Witness has developed Secure Smart Camera and its first version “Obscura Camera”, which offers privacy and anonymity to both those filming an event and those in the video who may be putting their lives at risk to protest human rights abuses or injustice. Responding to the organization’s findings in its Cameras Everywhere Report and the increase in the use of video in protests during 2011’s popular uprisings (ie: the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements), WITNESS hopes to minimize reprisals for filming human rights abuses. Obscura Camera will allow filmmaker activists to hide the identity of the filmmaker and faces in the crowd with boxes covering images or distorting faces through a program on their cameras or cell phones. “The Future of Protest Video", a multimedia article on the TheEconomist.com, clearly explains the details and the value of this technology to activists. It also introduces InformaCam, a plugin for Obscura Camera, which can embed information of the exact location and time of the video so that a spontaneous video may be regarded as more acceptable for use in court cases or advocacy campaigns. Clearly, Safe Secure Camera has the capacity to help video activists in multiple ways based on their immediate needs.

Overbrook supports WITNESS because of its use of modern technology to defend human rights defenders and provide these activists another tool for documenting critical human rights violations As the use of video to document these abuses increases, it is critical that those involved with these movements can be protected and, as a result, it is wonderful to hear that this program is getting so much positive feedback. For more information, this project has recently been featured in articles like The Economist’s Visibility for all, Forbes Magazine’s New York Flexes Its Tech Cred and Wired UK’s 25 big ideas for 2012: Always on sousveillance.

President Obama Denies Permit for Keystone XL Pipeline

Today marks a tremendous victory for environmentalists and all Americans as President Obama officially announced his denial of the permit to build the Keystone XL pipeline. (Click here to read the President's official statement.) The Overbrook Foundation is proud to be among those committed to preventing the construction of a pipeline which presented such a great threat to our environment and national interests. Most importantly, activists like Overbrook grantee 350.org should be proud of this accomplishment after they worked tirelessly to convince and mobilize so many Americans to take part in a committed movement fighting this pipeline. As one 350.org blogger wrote today, "Make no mistake, for all of us who have been protesting the project, this is a major victory. As late as October, a poll of 300 ‘energy insiders’ in Washington by the National Journal found that 97% thought the pipeline permit would be granted. We tipped the balance in a major way.” This statement and the coverage of the pipeline over the past few months reminds us that this win is particularly important in light of the uphill battle against the oil industry’s deep pockets and strong political influence. Energized by this victory, many in the environmental community have thanked Obama for sticking up for the American people and look to continue activism to promote better environmental practices and fight climate change in 2012.

If you want more information on the trajectory of this movement and commentary from Bill McKibben, please watch 350.org's video on the fight against Keystone XL. While it was made a couple of months ago, the video continues to be an important reminder of this environmental victory. We are very happy to share this news with our readers and congratulate our grantees on a job well done!

Overbrook Grantees Join National Campaign to Save 1 Million Pounds of Paper by Earth Day

Two Overbrook environment grantees, Catalog Choice and Environmental Paper Network, have teamed with Manilla, a free online and mobile service to manage bills, for the 2012 Paper Diet - a campaign to help consumers and businesses reduce their use of paper. The campaign's goal is for Americans to "lose" more than 1 million pounds of paper, while saving 13,000 trees, by Earth Day (April 22).

Just by opting out of unwanted catalogs and other advertising mail, Americans can lose half their paper weight. Other ways to lose include going paperless with direct mail, bills, and account statements. Catalog Choice, a service that helps people suppress unwanted catalogs, direct mail, and phonebooks, is a great tool to help in the challenge.

Consumers and businesses interested in taking the 2012 Paper Diet can pledge via Facebook by posting a digital badge on their page and by stopping their unwanted paper mail. The dieter who loses the most paper weight will receive a Paperless Toolbox, which includes an iPad, an iPad pen, a Kindle, Paperless Post stamps, and a shredder.

National Sexuality Education Standards Released in January 2012

After two years of development and coordination among researchers, national organizations on health education, doctors, public health professionals, teachers, young people and representatives of social justice and reproductive health organizations, National Sexuality Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K-12, the first report to compile standards for sexuality education, has been released. In response to the inconsistent and uncoordinated teaching of sexuality education across different states and school districts within the U.S., this publication provides a minimum base level of age-appropriate sexuality education for students in K-12. Major authors of the project are American Association for Health Education, the American School Health Association, the National Education Association Health Information Network, the Society of State Leaders for Health and Physical Education, and the Future of Sex Education Initiative (with the involvement of Overbrook grantee Advocates for Youth).

These guidelines are meant to assist teachers in translating "an emerging body of research related to school-based sexuality education so that it can be put into practice in the classroom.” The report presents a rationale for sexuality education in schools citing parental desire for this curriculum and statistical information on improved graduation rates and school performance, an opportunity to minimize bullying in schools, increased empowerment for students and adolescents, and a link to decreased rates of sexually transmitted infections and unintended teenage pregnancy. However, the majority of the report outlines basic lessons, goals and content to be covered in each grade. The seven topics in these standards include anatomy and physiology, puberty and adolescent development, identity, pregnancy and reproduction, sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, healthy relationships and personal safety. Despite maintaining a health focus, these standards contain extensive requirements for teaching about gender identity, sexual orientation, bullying, sexual assault, different family structures, proper anatomy and respect.

Many of the Overbrook Foundation’s Reproductive Justice grantees, including Advocates for Youth, stress the importance of comprehensive, quality and age-appropriate sexuality education for their constituents in all schools regardless of resource allocation, the community served or the geographic location. So, we are pleased to hear about grantee progress in this area. While the impact of these recommendations is yet to be seen, these standards are an important step towards making quality sexuality education more widely available to American children and adolescents. Access to this information will help individuals to make informed choices about their own sexuality and their relationships with others.

Please click here if you are interested in an article describing the response and a more complete summary of the new standards. It includes comments from Advocates for Youth President, Debra Hauser. If you are interested in the details of the standards, please download the full version of this publication.

National Ocean Council Plan of Action

The Obama administration released an "action plan" yesterday, in the form of a 118-page report, that expands upon the inter-agency National Ocean Council announced in the summer of 2010 (and blogged about here!)

The over-arching idea behind the Council is to increase collaboration, efficiency and data-sharing in a science-based approach to marine spatial planning. This way, areas deemed too fragile or critical for marine life will be zoned as off-limits for drilling, fishing, shipping and other uses. Federal agencies will share all non-confidential information on a publicly-available web site.

While the new action plan is a solid step toward the development of a national ocean policy, there is some trepidation that the Council will just create more bureaucracy, and also that it will be used more as a tool for developers than as a support for marine conservationists. For example, one of the objectives of the Council is to provide response plans for potential oil spills in the Arctic Ocean, since new shipping lanes and drilling spots are opening up due to increased melting of sea ice -- (this with apparent disregard for the fact that the ice is melting because of our reliance on oil and other greenhouse gas-producing fuel sources!)

But, if oil exploration and other industrial uses are inevitable, a streamlined agency overseeing the marine areas involved can provide faster and more comprehensive recommendations and responses.

Said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (and Overbrook grantee), "Every day, decisions are made about the industrial use of our oceans, and most of them are made on a 'first come, first served' ad hoc basis." An inter-agency council and national ocean policy can only help provide a longer-term, big-picture view of our oceans.

Read Cornelia Dean's NYT Green blog post here.