News & Features

Special thanks to ARTA River Trips for donating a rafting trip to the Rose Foundation and our New Voices students! Our work often centers on protecting our California rivers, but we rarely get a chance to jump right into them.

Last Wednesday 250 members of farm-working communities joined Californians for Pesticide Reform in Sacramento to call for a ban on the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos. The EPA has failed to ban Chlorpyrifos despite extensive scientific evidence of its harmfulness, leaving it up to the state government to protect farmworkers from this dangerous chemical. CPR has petitioned Governor Jerry Brown with a letter supported by 167,000 signatures calling for a statewide banned on chlorpyrifos.

“We want to tear down walls instead of build walls,” says Carlos Zambrano, the Rose Foundation’s New Voices are Rising Project Coordinator. Born and raised in Santa Cruz, Carlos studied at UC Berkeley before working toward environmental justice in Oakland. Carlos is excited for our students. “I love seeing the growth that students undergo and the confidence that they build” he says and is excited to plan a Summer Climate Justice Leadership Academy that brings down barriers.

Last Week, we participated in a Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board field day and had the pleasure of introducing Board members to the Rose Foundation and our New Voices Are Rising program. We offered the Board a tour of Coliseum College Preparatory Academy (CCPA) to explain our Clean Streams Green Teens project. The Clean Streams project will work with CCPA students to draft a stormwater plan to deal with the polluted runoff flowing into nearby Lion Creek.