Margaret Gordon

Margaret Gordon

Children living near the freeways in urban Oakland, Calif., are hospitalized for asthma at 12 times the rate of youths in the city’s more affluent – and greener – suburb of Lafayette. Years ago, Margaret Gordon didn’t know about how grave the situation was in her...

Shirley Caldwell-Patterson

In 1997, at age 79, Shirley Caldwell-Patterson attended a presentation by Victor Scoggins who showed a film of his swim down the Cumberland River in Tennessee and Kentucky. A long-time conservationist, Patterson was appalled at the condition of the Cumberland River...
Sharon Adams

Sharon Adams

After 30 years in New York, Sharon Adams moved back to Milwaukee in 1997 to find the once-vibrant Lindsay Heights neighborhood where she grew up lined with boarded-up houses and trash-filled lots. Gangs, prostitution and drugs on the streets spurred her to create a...
Richard Fox

Richard Fox

When Richard Fox learned in 2002 that some of the Lakota people living on the poverty-stricken Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota freeze to death every winter because they can’t afford to heat their poorly insulated or completely unheated homes, he was moved to...