Get on the Bus! - 30 recommended organizations include: Foods Not Bombs, Reef Relief, and Mothers and Others for a Livable Planet

Vegetarian Times, Nov, 2000 by Mark Harris

Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet

40 West 20th St.
New York, NY 10011
(212) 242-0010
Email: Mothers@mothers.org
Web site: www.mothers.org
Founders: Meryl Streep and Wendy
Gordon

If you remember the Alar-apple controversy of the late 1980s--and if you had a pulse you couldn't have missed it--you've seen Mothers & Others in action. With cofounder Meryl Streep leading the charge, the group launched a high-profile campaign against the carcinogenic spray that caused tainted apples to be pulled from grocery store shelves and school lunch trays across the land. As a result of their efforts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) eventually banned the chemical.

Mothers cut its teeth on the bad apple controversy, which solidified the group's agenda: to warn parents and others about ecological and health threats that lurk in their homes and communities. In the intervening 10 years, Mothers has uncovered a world of dangers, from genetically engineered foods and pesticides in the classroom to drinking water pollutants and breathing bad indoor air.

No mere town crier, Mothers is out to help. Through action kits and an award-winning publication, it offers concrete steps to a greener and safer planet. Among them: buying organic produce, joining community supported agriculture farms, investing in socially responsible companies, writing to Nestle to protest its use of genetically engineered (GE) ingredients, petitioning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to require labeling of GE foods.

God's Love We Deliver

166 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10013
(212) 294-8100
Email: tbeatty@glwd.org
Web site: www.glwd.org
Founder: Ganga Stone

One summer afternoon in 1985, a hospice volunteer delivered a bag of groceries to the Manhattan apartment of a young actor who was dying of AIDS. The man promptly knocked her gift to the floor, raging bitterly that he was too weak to even open the packages in her bag, let alone put together a meal. At that precise moment, that volunteer, whose name was Ganga Stone, vowed that no one with AIDS within her reach would ever go hungry. She quickly made good on her promise, founding God's Love We Deliver, a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization that cooks and delivers nourishing meals to homebound people with HIV/AIDS in New York City and parts of New Jersey. "At God's Love We Deliver," explains Nancy Mahon, executive director, "we provide healthy, delicious meals and important nutrition information to men, women and children with compromised immune systems. For them, our meals are life-sustaining."

With the support of government contracts, foundation grants, fundraisers and individual donations, the group prepared 633,629 meals last year, serving 3,759 clients, free of charge. And for those with AIDS and their caretakers, God's Love is appreciated not just for its health-giving meals but also for the noticeable lack of red tape in getting them.

SEVA Foundation

1786 Fifth St.
Berkeley, CA 94710
(510) 845-7382
Email: admin@seva.org
Web site: www.seva.org
Founder: Ram Dass and others