Dear friend,
Health care workers are the new American heroes.
This past August, as wildfires raged through California, 70 Dignity Health staff members showed up to care for patients even as their own homes were lost in the flames.
In October, while Hurricane Michael battered communities in Florida, hospital staff braved flood waters, flying debris, and power outages to continue caring for our most vulnerable.
Even as health care workers were themselves wounded, they continued to heal.
These selfless acts demonstrate how critical our health care leaders are to anchoring the resilience of our communities in the face of climate change. The health care sector is on the front lines of our climate crisis – it is not only working to mitigate climate change’s severity, but it is also the sector that simply cannot fail during extreme weather events...which are happening at greater frequency every year.
Health Care Without Harm has spent more than 20 years working to ensure health care is doing its part to create the conditions for healthy communities and a healthy planet.
Working with the federal government, we have equipped hospitals with tools for building extreme weather resilience. We have begun to change the global narrative to make people see that the climate crisis is a health crisis. And we have mobilized health care leaders to advocate for clean energy, sustainably sourced food, and safer chemicals as preventive medicine for many of the diseases that plague our families, communities, and planet.
By financially supporting Health Care Without Harm, you help us support health care heroes who are becoming climate champions.
Your support helps Health Care Without Harm transform the health sector, whose healing role must go beyond individual patients to healing communities and the planet that sustains us all.
The stakes have never been higher, and the urgency for action has never been greater. Over the last year, the climate crisis has come home for many of us. The wounds of extreme weather events are still raw, and we still have much work to do to mobilize health care in service of climate solutions. The feeling of helplessness can be overwhelming as each new headline describes our “impending” climate change doom. But just as the California health workers showed us in the fire, even when it feels like all is lost, there’s no underestimating the power of simply showing up.
I hope you can show up for Health Care Without Harm.
Give today.Thank you for your support,
Gary Cohen
Founder and President