The Rachel Carson Forum:
Creating Healthy Places to Live Learn and Play

Speaker Profiles

Phil Boise

Founder of GreenCare for Children and author of the Go Green Rating Scale

Phil Boise is a nationally recognized leader in environmental health and sustainability. He is the Executive Director of GreenCare for Life, a non-profit organization, and the director of the GreenCare for Children Program in Santa Barbara, California. Phil is the author of the Go Green Rating Scale for Early Childhood Settings; the Go Green Rating Scale for Early Childhood Settings Handbook: Improve Your Score; and other guidebooks about creating safe schools, parks, and landscapes. His enthusiastic hands-on approach to problem solving yields practical solutions to common challenges, as well as humorous anecdotes. Mr. Boise has worked with early care programs, schools, parks, landscape professionals, and ranchers on sustainable resource management and pesticide reduction for more than 25 years. He has served on the California Child Care Asthma Initiative Advisory Committee, the Santa Barbara County Child Care Planning Council, and the California School IPM (integrated pest management) Advisory Committee.

Jane Houlihan

Senior Vice President for Research, Environmental Working Group

info@ewg.org
(202) 667-6982

Jane Houlihan is Senior Vice President for Research at Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org). She directs research programs on environmental health and the hazards of chemicals in food, water and everyday consumer products. Under her direction EWG has created go-to resources for its one million members and other consumers seeking safer choices, including EWG¹s Skin Deep cosmetic safety database, the group¹s national tap water quality database covering 40,000 communities, and EWG¹s body burden testing programs detecting 500 industrial pollutants in Americans. She holds degrees in civil and environmental engineering from Georgia Tech and is a former senior engineer with national research and consulting groups.

Carol Stroebel

Children’s Environmental Health Network

carols@cehn.org
(540) 678-4111

Carol Stroebel is the Director of Training and Policy at the Children’s Environmental Health Network. She has developed and conducted trainings about pediatric environmental health for a wide range of audiences; she is especially skilled in making technical, medical and scientific information meaningful for a lay audience. Educated as a journalist, Stroebel also brings experience at many levels of government, educating about and promoting policy change on a variety of issues, with a focus on environmental health. Stroebel served as the Director of Intergovernmental Affairs of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), as legislative director for former U.S. Representative Norman Y. Mineta, as press secretary to a Midwestern Governor, and as Director of Federal Affairs for a national highway safety non-profit organization. Stroebel has expert knowledge of the public health community, the regulatory process, the legislative process, and the media. She has developed and implemented successful strategies integrating these participants and processes to advance public policy. She has coordinated advocacy efforts and has guided policy development in and out of government. She has been working with the Children’s Environmental Health Network since 1996 and currently resides in Winchester, VA.

Samantha Balbier, MSW

LEED© Green Associate, PA ECE Green & Healthy Initiative
Consultant, PA Office of Child Development and Early Learning, PA Key

sambalbier@comcast.net
(412) 260-0124

As the lead consultant to the Pennsylvania ECE Green & Healthy Initiative, Samantha Balbier is assisting the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with building a system of statewide supports to help early learning providers to become some of the country’s most environmentally healthy and environmentally friendly programs. Following her graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work, Ms. Balbier worked for the Heinz Endowments’ Children, Youth, & Families program where she focused grant making on early care and education, literacy, pediatric health, afterschool programming, and math and science for girls. As the Executive Director of a Pittsburgh-based environmental health organization, she partnered with Allegheny General Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh to build the AT Home program. Ms. Balbier is certified by the U.S. Green Building Council Institute as a LEED© (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Associate. She is also certified with this specialty as an instructor under the Pennsylvania Quality Assurance System (PQAS). She is a member of the Pittsburgh Green Schools Committee through the Green Building Alliance.