Northside Neighbor
September 25, 2014
By Sally White
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Four concerned women are hosting the Clean Air Luncheon Oct. 3 at the St. Regis Atlanta in Buckhead. The event is titled Our Changing Climate is Changing Our Weather — How To Protect Our Families. October is National Children’s Health Month.
In 2004 Laura Turner Seydel and Stephanie Blank, two well-known community leaders and Atlanta moms concerned about the air their children and others were breathing, joined forces to do something about it. They took action and founded the Mothers & Others for Clean Air program to raise awareness and encourage the broader community to take action and improve the quality of the air everyone breathes.
Two other women who champion public health and issues of global climate, Lisa Rayner and Andrea Young, are joining the founders to host a powerful presentation. It will feature keynote speaker Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia’s Atmospheric Sciences Program, 2013 president of the American Meteorological Society and an international expert in areas of weather and climate.
Three other authorities on clean air will join the presentation: Dr. George Luber, epidemiologist and associate director of global climate change at the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention; Heather McTeer Toney, regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Southeast region; and Dr. Jennifer Shih, physician and assistant professor of the departments of medicine and pediatrics at Emory University Hospital and Medical School.
Sam Champion, anchor and managing editor of The Weather Channel, will emcee the affair with 15-year-old Mikayla Wiseman as toastmaster relating how air pollution impacts her asthma.
Mothers & Others is a program of the American Lung Association of the Southeast. It raises funds to educate and engage people in the area by promoting individual actions and policy change to improve air quality, reduce ground-level ozone and decrease hospital admissions due to respiratory illnesses and emergency room visits for asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
Tickets and information: (770) 544-0508 or www.mocleanair.org
