About Us

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

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

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

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.