Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition 24th Anniversary
Remarks by Michele Kirsch and Martha Kanter
October 7, 2006
Thank you. We are thrilled to celebrate SVTC’s 24th anniversary tonight. Unfortunately Steve and Michele Kirsch could not join us this evening, but have asked me to share with you their support of your efforts and why they became so passionate about this work. Michele Kirsch prepared these remarks for us this evening:
Michele Kirsch: To begin, we’d like to give you a little bit of history on how the Kirsch Foundation became involved with not only this center, but how we are committed to preserving our environment and protecting this planet.
My husband’s interest for environmental issues really started when he was growing up as a child in Los Angeles and breathing dirty air. I grew up in Davis where everyone was riding bicycles to school and work and didn’t have to breathe smog BUT when we got together and started our foundation, we both knew we wanted to make a valuable contribution to saving our environment.
While we both drive electric cars, and help to work in cleaning up the air in California with our current focus on air quality in the San Joaquin Valley (where it is one of the dirtiest air basins in the country), it’s not enough.
We fully support work that keeps toxic substances out of our air and water. But our foundation is only one small force so we focus our work to support causes that help work with solutions and not just address symptoms.
We were thrilled when we were approached to be a part of funding this building and having the opportunity to work with De Anza College, with Martha Kanter, Julie Phillips and literally hundreds of others, including former state senator Rebecca Morgan, who, through the Morgan Family Foundation, endowed the first chair of the college in Environmental Studies. In fact, it was the first chair at a community college anywhere in the world. We took bold steps – all of us, both in philanthropy and in education.
As community leaders who enabled the first green building on a community college campus, we are honored to have been part of the collaboration that made it possible. Now many other community colleges, universities and K-12 school districts are making visits here to see the viability of our facility and have started to develop or break ground on many more new green buildings.
Most of all, this building is a place for learning about the environment. It is our foundation’s ultimate hope that the people who learn in and leave this facility years from now will become involved in our community, in California and in our country to become the leaders in making the link between clean technology and green buildings a norm.
Thank you.
Martha Kanter: Let me now add a few words of my own to what Michele prepared. As you can see, she and Steve speak and act both from the heart and from their experience. Like so many of you who support the significant, critical work of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, we all have so much more to do.
Let me tell you about what happens in the Kirsch Center. Because of her passion and the passion of her colleagues across the campus and in the community, Julie Phillips of our faculty, a former SVTC Board member who now holds the Morgan Chair that was referenced in Michele’s remarks and who created our Environmental Studies Department, drew all of us into her environmental web to make this building happen, from the students, to the faculty and staff, to the administrators, and to our governing board.
I’d like to acknowledge the Foothill-De Anza Board of Trustees for it is truly their vision and leadership in approving our first green building that allowed us to move forward to the vision of fully greening our campuses toward building an environmental sustainable community.
As I think about the generations of students and community members who will come after us to receive an education in this building, I must return to Julie’s academic vision. In this building each and every day, Julie and her colleagues are molding our students into environmental stewards throughout our region. Thousands of students are learning to assess the environmental condition of their own neighborhoods; they are learning to go before our local city councils and state legislature to advocate for a safe, sustainable environment for themselves and their children; and they are learning the skills and theories that will help us discover new ways to address pollution, global warming, energy conservation and land preservation. One of their great ideas is to circle the world’s 37th parallel on which we are standing today to create sustainable wildlife corridors around the world so people, animals and plants will be able to grow and change the world for the better. In Julie’s seminar course, our students explore local case studies along the 37th parallel associated with biodiversity, energy management, environmental compliance and environmental education.
We have many visions, each of us, but it is truly through the power and synchrony of collaboration, communication and creativity shown by individuals and organizations that take risks to do what is right – people like the Kirsches, the Morgans, Julie Phillips and organizations like the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and our colleges that will work together to realize an environment in which we can all take pride.
On behalf of the Kirsches, De Anza College and the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, thank you so much for honoring our work. Evenings like this are inspirational and remind us how much more we must do.
Thank you!
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