• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Safer Chemicals Healthy Families

A national effort to protect families from toxic chemicals.

  • Get Involved
  • Our Work
    • News
    • Public Policy
    • Mind the Store
    • Successes
  • Get the Facts
  • About
  • Donate

About Us

Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and the Mind the Store campaign fight for strong chemical policy, work with retailers to phase out hazardous chemicals, and educate the public about ways to protect our families from toxic chemicals. Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and Mind the Store are programs of Toxic-Free Future.

Toxic-Free-Future-logo

Our mission

  • Policy: Safer Chemicals Healthy Families supports strong federal and state policies that protect the public from toxic chemicals.
  • Retailers: The Mind the Store campaign works to transform the marketplace by winning comprehensive corporate policies that eliminate toxic chemicals.
  • Education: Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and Mind the Store develop content and advocate for a public that can use its power as citizens and consumers effectively.

Our work

We collaborate with hundreds of organizations and businesses. Our work is united by our common concern about toxic chemicals in our homes, workplaces, schools and products we use every day.

Our founder

Safer Chemicals Healthy Families was founded in 2009 by environmental health trailblazer Andy Igrejas. Andy built a diverse coalition of hundreds of organizations and businesses that worked together to reform our nation’s broken chemical safety system, which resulted in Congress’s 2016 update to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). He conceived our Mind the Store campaign as a tactic to drive the chemical industry to the table in our fight for this reform for fear of losing market share at retail. Andy passed away in 2018 and we miss him dearly. Our staff and coalition partners honor his legacy by carrying on this work.

Our accomplishments

Learn about some of our successes.

Offices

Washington, DC

200 Massachusetts Ave NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20001

New York

109 S William St
Newburgh, NY 12550

Washington

4649 Sunnyside Ave N, Suite 540
Seattle, WA 98103

Email us.


Our staff

Share
Tweet
Liz Hitchcock

Liz Hitchcock

Director

Liz Hitchcock is Director of Safer Chemicals Healthy Families. She coordinates work with partner organizations and leads advocacy efforts on Capitol Hill and at EPA and other federal agencies. She joined the team in 2011 after four years as the public health advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. In that capacity, she led U.S. PIRG’s campaigns on environmental health issues including product safety, chemical policy reform, chemical facility security, and food safety. She coordinated PIRG’s successful campaign to win landmark federal standards for toxic lead and phthalates in children’s products in the 2008 reform of Consumer Product Safety Commission and was PIRG's lead lobbyist on the food safety campaign that resulted in the 2010 passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act. She has a B.A. in Politics from Mount Holyoke College and is a native of Schenectady, NY.

Posts by Liz Hitchcock

Mike Schade

Mike Schade

Mind the Store Campaign Director

Mike Schade is the Campaign Director for Mind the Store, a program that challenges the nation’s leading retailers to transform the marketplace away from hazardous chemicals and towards safer alternatives. For the previous nine years, Mike was the Markets Campaign Coordinator with the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ), a national environmental health organization where he led national campaigns to phase out PVC plastic, phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA) and dioxin in consumer products and packaging. Prior to CHEJ, he was the Director of the Buffalo office of Citizens’ Environmental Coalition (CEC), a NY statewide grassroots environmental health organization. He has a B.S. in Environmental Studies from the University at Buffalo and lives in Newburgh, NY.

Posts by Mike Schade

Beth Kemler

Beth Kemler

Mobilization Director

Beth Kemler is the Mobilization Director for Safer Chemicals Healthy Families and Mind the Store. She has been organizing public interest campaigns for fifteen years, focusing on both policy and markets-based campaigns. Most recently, she served as the Virginia Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, leading a team that got bills for climate solutions passed and exposed the commonwealth's top climate-polluting companies. Before that, Kemler worked on Oceana's successful campaign on mercury in seafood and organized students with Free The Planet! and the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group. Her professional organizing career started in college when she was a door-to-door canvasser in her hometown of Philadelphia.

Posts by Beth Kemler

Stephanie Stohler

Communications Director

A skilled strategic communications professional with more than 14 years experience, Stephanie most recently served as the Communications Director for the national nonprofit alliance Healthy Babies Bright Futures where she developed, led, and supported communications campaigns for dozens of projects, programs, and initiatives resulting in significant local, national, and international visibility. She holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Public Relations and Corporate Communications and a bachelor’s degree from Boston College.

Laurie Valeriano

Executive Director, Toxic-Free Future

Laurie Valeriano has worked for Toxic-Free Future since 1995. She has worked to pass strong environmental health policies at the state level for more than 20 years. During those years she has led successful campaigns to ban toxic flame retardants, and adopt the strongest standards in the nation for toxic chemicals in toys and children’s products. Laurie received her B.A in Political Science from the State University at Albany in 1991.

To learn more about Toxic-Free Future and its other programs, visit www.toxicfreefuture.org.

Polluted Polly

Polluted Polly

Senior Activist

A passionate activist, Polly recently joined the team to help get unnecessary toxic substances, like PFAS, out of food packaging materials. It is Polly’s lifelong mission to protect people, communities, and the environment from toxic PFAS chemicals that ooze out of packaging and last forever, polluting our air, food, water, and soil. Learn more about Polly’s work here and connect with her on TikTok @PollutedPolly.

Primary Sidebar

person stripping paint

Tell Biden’s EPA: Ban this deadly chemical from the workplace

Take Action

Get the Facts

These chemicals are linked to serious environmental and health problems. Check out our fact sheets, which draw from the leading peer-reviewed science.

  • Bisphenol A (BPA) & Bisphenol S (BPS)
  • Formaldehyde
  • Methylene chloride
  • Persistent, Bioaccumulative and Toxic Chemicals (PBTs)
  • PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances)
  • Phthalates
  • Toxic flame retardants
Other Chemicals »

Footer

Contact Us

200 Massachusetts Ave NW
Suite 700
Washington, DC 20001
Email

Search

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

© 2022 Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families — All rights reserved.

  • About Us
  • Privacy policy
  • Disclaimer
  • Feed