THE 1994 SCHUMACHER AWARD RECIPIENTS

The first Awards were made in October 1994 in celebration of the 21st anniversary of the publication of Small is Beautiful, twenty-five awards were made to the individuals and organisations listed below

Nicholas Albery | The Bristol Cancer Help Centre

The Centre for Alternative Technology |Common Ground | John Davis

Elinore Detiger | The Ecologist | The Environmental Law Foundation

The Gaia Foundation | Michael & Eirwen Harbottle

Dr Gordon & Dr Barbara Latto | Geoffrey Lean | Letslink-UK | Ulrich Loening

Gerard Morgan-Grenville | The New Economics Foundation

The S.A.F.E. Alliance | Walter Schwarz |Tessa Tennant

The Women's Environmental Network

NICHOLAS ALBERYis best known as Director of the Institute for Social Inventions. He first became directly involved in Schumacher's ideas in 1981, when he worked for John Papworth (the founder of Resurgence magazine) to set up the first Fourth World Assembly in London, on the theme of 'small nations, small communities and the human spirit'. The purpose was to try to apply Schumacher's ideas to the size of nations, particularly examining the concept that a nation needs to be under 14 million or so inhabitants if it is to have a chance of solving its problems. Four hundred people participated in the Assembly.

In the years since, Nicholas has helped to develop many initiatives that grew out of this Assembly: a book, modestly entitled How to Save the World - A Fourth World Guide to the Politics of Scale; the Institute for Social Inventions, which acts as an international suggestions box for human-scale ideas and projects, and which tries to promote and to carry out projects that will help restore a feeling of neighbourhood; the Fourth World Trust, a charity he established to raise the finance for such projects; the Natural Death Centre, to empower families and communities which are trying to take back some control over the process of dying from the big institutions; the East Europe Constitution Design Forum, which helps the new small nations of Eastern Europe to develop electoral systems that will protect their minorities; and the Council for Posterity, which acts in an advocacy role for that group of people whose interests are most sorely neglected in our democracies - future generations.

The Natural Death Centre (and the Institute for Social Inventions)
6 Blackstock Mews, Blackstock Road, LONDON, N4 2BT
T 020 7359 8391, F 020 7354 3831, W www.naturaldeath.org.uk
E ndc@alberyfoundation.org

THE BRISTOL CANCER HELP CENTRE, a registered charity, was founded in 1980 by Pat and Christopher Pilkington, Penny and David Brohn, and Dr Alec and Norah Forbes. It has its roots in a Christian healing centre, and came into being at a time when the emotional, mental and spiritual distress experienced by cancer sufferers was hardly taken into account in the management of their treatment and recovery.

Fourteen years later it is very gratifying to find that many of the 'Bristol' therapies of healing, relaxation, meditation, visualisation and counselling are being incorporated into NHS hospitals, along with massage, aromatherapy and other useful and creative therapies. This year has seen a new landmark in the Centre's development. Fundholding GPs have begun to send NHS patients to Bristol so that they may go into their medical treatment strengthened in mind and spirit.

The Centre in Bristol is still at the leading edge of discovery and pioneering of transformational medicine. A recently created nutritional database gathers together research drawn from international scientific studies looking into the use of vitamins, minerals and nutrition in the treatment of cancer. It is evident from studying over 3000 research papers that there is now a huge body of evidence completely validating the nutritional policies which have been practised at the Centre for fourteen years.

Due to the huge success of this project, when funds allow, the Centre plans to create a 'mind/body/spirit' database, to collect together the world literature on the way body-function is influenced by mind and the spirit. It is clear to all the doctors, therapists and healers working at the Centre that when patients experience the transformational process of finding their spiritual nature and inner healing potential, the chemistry of the physical body shifts and all systems, including the immune system, are energised, effecting positive and sometimes magical healing processes.

Bristol Cancer Help Centre, Grove House, Cornwallis Grove, Clifton, Bristol BS8 4PG. Tel 0272 743216; Fax 0272 239184. Supporters' Newsletter, Workshops, Publications

THE CENTRE FOR ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY (CAT) is concerned with the search for globally sustainable, whole and ecologically sound technologies and ways of life.

Within this search the role of CAT is to explore and demonstrate a wide range of alternatives, communicating to other people the options for them to achieve positive change in their own lives. This communication involves inspiring (instilling the desire to change by practical example); informing (feeding the desire to change by providing the most appropriate information); and enabling (providing effective and continuing support to put the change into practice).

CAT has a holistic approach to its work, integrating ideas and practice relating to land use, shelter, energy conservation and use, diet and health, waste management and recycling. Through its resident community and work organisation CAT is also committed to the implementation of co-operative principles and the best achievable environmental practices.

The means CAT uses to fulfil its aims vary with time, but include: operating a display and demonstration centre, open to the general public and associated with a resident community; supplying books, products, wholefood supplies, catering and consultancy services; running day and residential courses; giving outside lectures and seminars, for schools, colleges and the general public; providing an information service by telephone, post or in person, publishing relevant information material; and having a world-wide membership and support network.

Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Powys SY20 9AZ. Tel 0654 702400; Fax 0654 702782. Day and Residential Visits; Publications

COMMON GROUND works to excite people to stand up for the things which are important to them about their everyday lives. Since its foundation in 1983, Common Ground's guiding belief has been that we have to create a popular culture of wanting to care, and that imagination and humanity, as well as the ecological imperative, are needed in reinventing our relations with nature and the land.

The staff of Common Ground numbers only 4-6 people. The organisation has no membership, preferring to give people the sense that their values matter, and that they can change things for themselves. Through model projects, events and publications they try to inspire, inform and give ideas and courage to people to conserve, enhance and celebrate their everyday surroundings. With Parish Maps, Apple Day, Local Distinctiveness, Tree Dressing Day and the New Milestones project they have introduced new ways of helping communities creatively involve themselves with their cultural landscape.

The Parish Maps project asks 'What do you value in your place?': putting everyone in the role of expert, helps people socially to chart the detail of their place and together initiate ways of caring for it.

The apple is a wonderful symbol of variety, the orchard a rich example of the cultural landscape. In promoting Apple Day (October 21st), community, school and city orchards, as well as the conservation of traditional orchards Common Ground has established a popular project about bio-diversity and the importance of keeping knowledge and practice alive in the place of origin, which is real sustainability.

Sue Clifford and Angela King will accept the Award on behalf of Common Ground.

COMMON GROUND
41 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HJ. Tel 071 379 3109; Fax 071 836 5741. Publications

JOHN DAVIS first met Fritz Schumacher when working for Shell International Petroleum Company. On his retirement, Fritz invited him to join the Intermediate Technology Development Group to enable a response to be made to demands on the Group for the philosophy of "Small is Beautiful" to be applied to the UK. For six years he was mainly occupied with the development of the first thirty voluntary Local Enterprise Trusts/Agencies. This was a project that Fritz supported enthusiastically, before his untimely death. Business in the Community was formed to promote further development on the basis of the initial success. By 1988 the network had grown to about 300, and a growing number of new and existing small firms were being served. About 100,000 jobs a year were either being created or saved with the help of these local agencies; and research has shown that they had double the chance of survival compared with jobs in other firms that did not have the benefit of this voluntary service. The work of the project is described in As though people mattered (IT Publications, 1986); and in two more books Small Beginnings and Just for Starters (IT Publications, 1984).

After the creation of Business in the Community, the work of the project changed direction. Technology Exchange Ltd, of which John has been a Board Member, under the direction of Brian Padgett, has become the most effective means of the non-exclusive transfer of small-scale technologies world-wide.

Since 1986 John has been a Trustee of the New Economics Foundation and involved in some of its projects.

In 1991 his book Greening Business (Blackwell) was published in response to a request for a management book on sustainable development which reflects Schumacher's ideas and philosophy of business management.

Since his election to a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, with a few other Fellows he has been seeking to get sustainable development and industrial ecology on to the Academy agenda - at last with some success.

ELINORE DETIGER was born in Honduras, and spent her childhood in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Iowa, USA. Although she travels widely, Britain has for many years been her spiritual home.

Having spent the early years of her married life bringing up five children, in 1975 she felt compelled to put her time and energy into global work. For ten years she became involved in all aspects of the holistic health movement, with a special focus on cancer as the great teacher. Through The Detiger Foundation and the Tiger Trust, of which she is Founder Director, many pioneers were helped and funded during these years, clinics set up, books published, and seminars arranged.

From 1985 onwards she has focused on supporting United Nations-related programmes, such as the International Year for Peace and the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica. Also in the 80s, the idea of a global women's network began to take shape. Efforts to bring councils of women together has resulted in groups taking form in various countries such as Britain, Ireland, Holland, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, and North America. These are loose associations which support other women and women's groups worldwide, leading towards the Fourth UN World Forum on Women to be held in Beijing in 1995. Eleanor is the Founder and Facilitator of the International Council of Wise Women of Great Britain.

Eleanor's great gift is as a networker and enabler, making connections between spiritual, sociological and ethnic issues. She continues to sponsor seminars, arrange speakers and disseminate information on a range of subjects related to the problems we face today. Besides health, holistic education and women's issues, she is actively engaged in supporting the cause of the Tibetan people, and bridging the gap between complementary and orthodox spiritual perspectives. And she works to help indigenous peoples, particularly from Latin America, come into partnership with the rest of the world as valid members of our global family.

THE ECOLOGIST was founded 24 years ago by Edward Goldsmith and has earned itself an international reputation not only for providing hard-hitting, factual analysis but also "for frequently setting the agenda for other environmental campaigners" (The Guardian). From its landmark "manifesto", A Blueprint for Survival, to its analyses of the politics of the World Bank and GATT, its critiques of science, patriarchy and other dominant world views, and its documentation of the social and environmental impact of dams, intensive agriculture and nuclear power, The Ecologist has played a significant role in exposing the dynamics behind the destructiveness of modern development and in supporting movements seeking other ways of living.

Constantly challenging the mainstream, The Ecologist has remained steadfast in its commitment to radical economic and social alternatives. Tracing the current ecological crisis to the enclosure of peoples' commons by the forces of development, The Ecologist works closely with groups all over the world which are seeking to resist globalisation and to reclaim the local.

The editors of The Ecologist are Nicholas Hildyard, Edward Goldsmith, Peter Bunyard and Patrick McCully.

The Ecologist, Agriculture House, Bath Road, Sturminster Newton, Dorset DT10 1DU. Subscriptions: Tel 0403 782644.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL LAW FOUNDATION (ELF) was launched in January 1992 after some years in preparation. It was formed by a group of environmentalists, environmental scientists, academics, consultants and practising lawyers. ELF's emergence was in response to the call from environmentalists who noted that, whereas corporations and other institutions were receiving strong professional guidance and advice on environmental and developmental issues (generally, by way of defending or justifying their adverse activities), the community at large, and local citizens in particular, could not afford to obtain similar support. It was to redress this imbalance that ELF came into being.

Through a nation-wide and growing membership of environmentally qualified professionals, ELF enables citizens and community groups to obtain expert advice and, where appropriate, representation in confronting environmental issues. The initial consultation and assessment is provided without charge and if further steps are appropriate, legal aid is obtained where available. If such aid is not forthcoming, ELF's members charge at legal aid levels, so providing a low cost skilled service ensuring that those hitherto disadvantaged communities now have full access to remedies and equal opportunity for obtaining sound guidance.

ELF has already handled some 350 environmental cases of various types and complexity. It has had minimal finance and its operation has been almost entirely dependent upon voluntary support. In the short time of its existence, ELF has clearly demonstrated the need for such an agency to work in defence of the community and marks in a practical way the concept of thinking globally and acting locally.

The Foundation will shortly be providing multi-disciplinary training for practitioners and students, as well as issuing publications including case work papers. A national database is currently being developed. ELF is also poised to provide guidance to small and medium-sized enterprises to ensure that they undertake and maintain their business activities according to good environmental practice, thereby pro-actively ensuring the avoidance of problems.

ELF's long-term aim will to advise on, interpret and initiate UK and EC environmental legislation.

Environmental Law Foundation, Lincon's Inn, 42 Kingsway, London WC2B 6EX. Tel 071 404 1030; Fax 071 404 1032. Information & Donations

THE GAIA FOUNDATION, founded in 1984 by Edward Posey and Liz Hoskins, is concerned with increasing our experience and understanding of the planet as a living whole, of which humanity is only a part.

The Foundation is involved with people and projects around the world working to protect and revitalise cultural and ecological diversity. It actively seeks out, supports and promotes the work of outstanding individuals or groups who are rooted in their local community and innovators in their field. A number of these people are Gaia Associates, who form a network which responds to global issues such as threats to biodiversity and which accompanies local communities seeking to evolve their own development path.

Lately, Gaia has focused on working with rainforest peoples who have decided that their traditional ways of life can best fulfil both their material and spiritual needs, giving them a richer quality of life than they find through western development.

Gaia works in partnership with three major programmes in the rainforests of Amazonia which combine human rights and responsibilities with conservation and cultural recuperation. These initiatives are led by the indigenous communities themselves.

Gaia House in London is a base for visiting Associates and Southern partners. It is a centre where the voice of the South can be heard and from which Southern experience and philosophy are disseminated. Gaia collaborates with a network of individuals and organisations in the North who have similar concerns. In these different ways Gaia hopes to enrich and deepen development and environment thinking in the North by recalling its scientific, philosophical, spiritual and cultural roots.

The Gaia Foundation, 18 Well Walk, London NW3 1LD. Tel 071 435 5000; Fax 071 431 0551. Registered charity. Membership & donations.

MICHAEL AND EIRWEN HARBOTTLE are co-Directors of The Centre For International Peacebuilding, which was founded in 1983 to create bridges of understanding in conflict situations through co-operation on practical projects. These have included sharing methodologies for Conductive Education (UK/Hungary) for training of the motor disabled; reclamation of open-cast coal mines (UK/Bulgaria) through tree planting; schools' twinning for environmental education (UK/Kenya); and the development of youth co-operation on a global scale through international productions of the musical Peace Child, including the publication of Children's State of the Planet Handbook and Rescue Mission: Planet Earth (this having involved 10,000 young people world-wide).

The Centre is presently concerned with two major projects which have attracted international interest:

(1) A research into the contribution that armed forces world-wide can make to their national programmes for environmental protection. In this context, Michael Harbottle's What is Proper Soldiering is being widely read and is required reading for students at the three Services Staff Colleges in the UK.

(2) A research project which is considering a sounder structure for collective security based on sub regions of 7-8 countries, embracing all facets of economic, social, ethnic and environmental considerations.

The Centre has recently assumed responsibility for developing the world-wide Consultative Association of Retired Generals and Admirals, of which Michael Harbottle is Co-ordinator. This Association, currently covering 18 countries and 4 continents, acts to respond by consensus to threats to regional or global security, applying their military wisdom and experience to their peaceful resolution, and reporting their findings to their respective Heads of State and the United Nations, where appropriate.

Centre for International Peacebuilding, 9 West Street, Chipping Norton, Oxon OX7 5LH. Tel 0608 642335; Fax 0608 644732. Publications, Donations.

DOCTORS GORDON AND BARBARA LATTO, who retired at the end of last year from over five decades of their joint healing ministry, will be remembered with love and gratitude by thousands of people world-wide.

Gordon began practising as a General Practitioner and 'Nature Cure' Physician in 1938 in a small Practice in Essex. In the same year he married Barbara, a German Doctor who had been brought up with the ideas and practicalities of 'Nature Cure' (Naturopathy) methods. Whilst maintaining their own individual specialisations, they worked together in applying and teaching the principles of Natural Healing which is concerned with the healing of the whole person. This includes the healing power of food, fasting, water treatment, breathing and other remedial exercises, understanding of rest and relaxation, as well as care of the mind, the emotions and the Spirit. It deals with causes rather than the symptoms of dis-ease and has an important part to play in the wide world of holistic healing.

Gordon in particular pioneered these unconventional methods of healing during the 40s, 50s and 60s, when he was a lone voice in the medical profession. He served as President of the Vegetarian Society from 1960 to 1987 and as President of the International Vegetarian Union from 1971 to 1990. Barbara became a founder member of 'Beauty without Cruelty' started by Lady Dowding in the 60s. She also became a Council Member of the Soil Association, where she served for 20 years, while Fritz Schumacher was President and acting Chairman.

Their healing, teaching and inspiration was recognised by Schumacher long before the publication of Small is Beautiful. Their steadfast adherence to basic principles made them popular nominees for these first Schumacher Awards - Gordon, with his pioneering courage and unerring intuition; and Barbara, with her innate ability to bring people together for constructive action - created a partnership of high energy and healing powers.

GEOFFREY LEAN will at the end of this year celebrate a quarter of a century as an environment correspondent on British newspapers. For the earlier part of that time it was rather a lonely business; for many years he was the only full-time environment specialist on a national newspaper.

He began specialising in the environment within weeks of joining his first newspaper, The Yorkshire Post, and continued until 1977, when he joined The Observer, where Barbara Ward and Fritz Schumacher had created a tradition of environmental concern. In surveys the readership rated the environment as its strongest concern, and Geoffrey was proud to serve it for 16 years. When The Observer changed hands in 1993 he was made redundant, and joined the Independent on Sunday to expand its environmental coverage. He is also Environment Consultant to Central Television (putting up ideas for programmes) and has been helping the United Nations Environment Programme to relaunch its magazine, Our Planet, as a capacity-building journal.

He is the author of Rich World, Poor World (George Allen and Unwin, and Japan Publications Inc, 1978), which draws heavily on Schumacher's and Ward's ecological and spiritual philosophies; co-author of Chernobyl, the end of the Nuclear Dream (Pan and 19 foreign language editions, 1986) the first book on the disaster; and general editor of The Atlas of the Environment (Hutchinson, 1990). His greatest current concern is to work out how the media can move from alerting the public to the environmental crisis, to illustrating solutions and debating priorities for action.

LETSLINK, the national LETS (Local Enterprise Trusts) Development Agency, was set up in 1991 as an independent non-profit agency to introduce, develop, support and promote the growth of Local Enterprise Trust systems as widely as possible. The principle on which LETS works is that local currencies offer an ecological route out of poverty and unemployment, rebuild communities and act like lifeboats in the storms of international trade and finance.

In 1990 LETSLink UK's founder Liz Shepherd felt the time was ripe to put community currency systems to the test, and set up the agency and a national network to explore and develop their potential. The approach has been to create appropriate, low-cost home-grown methods for any group to establish and sustain its own interest-free system of exchange, enabling grassroots initiatives that empower people to activate skills and resources at all level to meet local needs.

Although working as a "bootstrap" initiative without external funding, after two years the operation has achieved notable success. For example, LETSystems have mushroomed (from 5 to approaching 200 in two years). LETSLink helps the groups to launch by producing a range of materials for the (so far) 30,000 enquiries from groups and individuals seeking to join or set up their own local networks. A LETS Handbook is being prepared, to be followed by a TV film, LETS Shops, and a research project and demonstration project on a riot-torn estate.

LETSLink is also stimulating growing interest in community currencies elsewhere in the world: it has introduced the concept into most European countries, assisted the setting up of national support networks in seven, and advised on their introduction in the struggle against poverty elsewhere including South Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

LETSLINK UK, 61 Woodcock Road, Warminster, Wilts BA12 9DH. Tel & Fax 0985 217871. Information on LETS

DR ULRICH LOENING's view that scientific understanding leads more to reverence than to domination of nature matured over a period of many years. He grew up in the small Quaker village of Jordans, near Beaconsfield, became a student, researcher and teacher of biochemistry, and is now a human ecologist. His biological research (1959-68) led directly to new "appropriate" and "intermediate" techniques which illuminated evolution and cancer (1976-84).

He has been involved in the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Human Ecology since its founding in 1972, and in 1984 became its Director. Successfully overcoming departmental specialisation in universities and promoting holistic thinking, the Centre has developed wide international contacts. It has organised many conferences and workshops, public lectures, a number of campaigns against nuclear developments, and launched energy conservation, organic agriculture and other environmental bodies. Now the Centre has its own MSc in Human Ecology for mature students - still the only post-graduate course with that title, teaching beyond the discipline, combining head, hand and heart. The idea that the satisfaction of fundamental human needs can be matched to the resources of nature, has led to co-operation with Latin American and European universities, to launch an international PhD in Ecological Economics.

Always linking the practical with the philosophical, Ulrich and family have converted an old stables into their house, using re-cycled timbers, fitting large solar panels and growing much of their food. Ulrich has started a small ecological forest and timber company to encourage local awareness about native woods. Their house hosts music, meetings and workshops. And the whole depends on the enthusiasm and continued support of his wife, Francesca.

GERARD MORGAN-GRENVILLE has been one of the most creative activists in the environmental field since the 1960s. Through the Society for Environmental Improvement, a registered charity set up with funds from his family, in 1969 he set up the Centre for Alternative Technology (see separate Award), which has become an internationally recognised flagship for the demonstration of green ideas in practice.

Together with Maurice Ash, he started the Green Alliance in 1978. Originally conceived as a political party, it developed into a political pressure group. He also set up the UK branch of Ecoropa - the trans-European ecological interest group. Educational and campaigning leaflets were written and distributed in quantities of several million.

More recently he has been involved in the setting up in the Isère region of France the Terre Vivante project (Organic Horticulture), and is currently working on the establishment of a European Centre for greater ecological sustainability. This will be a major project on a site of many thousand acres.

THE NEW ECONOMICS FOUNDATION (NEF) grew out of The Other Economic Summit (TOES), founded in 1984 and now held every year in parallel to the seven richest nations' summit. Over the past eight years, the Foundation has been working to explore and promote an alternative vision - of ideas and practical schemes based on the needs of people and the environment.

NEF has pioneered the debate about new economic indicators which talk to issues of quality and sustainability rather than quantity and consumerism. Such indicators provide and alternative way of measuring wealth and progress, and, in turn, opportunities to redirect the economy to those ends.

Current initiatives include formulating alternative economic indicators, investigating community enterprise, energy conservation, linking faith and ethics to economics, and understanding social investment and sustainable development. NEF relies on the support of individuals and groups to carry on their work, spreading the understanding of the ideas and principles of New Economics - showing people that there are solutions to today's awesome problems: human-scale solutions to which they can contribute.

New Economics Foundation, 88-94 Wentworth Street, London E1 7SA. Tel 071 377 5696; Fax 071 377 5720. Membership, Donations & Publications

THE SAFE ALLIANCE (Sustainable Agriculture, Food and Environment) is a coalition of thirty-five small farmer, consumer, environment, Third world, organic farming and animal welfare organisations, united by a common interest in food production. It is one of a growing network of such alliances across Europe.

SAFE's work involves both specific projects and educational and campaigning work on environment, social and consumer issues concerned with food production. Current work includes a detailed examination of food retailing, policy development work on European Agricultural policy, campaigning work on 'food miles', consumer labelling and organic farming, and research on small farming and the wildlife benefits of organic agriculture.

The central concern of the SAFE Alliance is agricultural policy, and specifically the CAP. SAFE is working on policy proposals which recognise the validity of a diversity of concerns about agricultural policy - which need to be tackled holistically, rather than by the reductionist approach which predominates and drives official policy.

SAFE Alliance, 38 Ebury Street, London SW1W 0LU. Tel 071 823 5660; Fax 071 823 5673. Publications

WALTER SCHWARZ is a writer, staff journalist on The Guardian (Religious Affairs Correspondent) and lecturer, deeply committed to Green issues. He is the author, with Dorothy Schwarz, of Breaking Through: Theory and Practice of Holistic Living (Green Books 1987) and of The New Dissenters (Bedford Square Press 1989).

In most of his career as foreign correspondent for The Guardian in Africa, India, the Middle East and Europe, he was a political journalist; his conversion to Green thinking came relatively late, after contact with Petra Kelly and the German Greens while covering the anti-missile peace movement in the early 1980s.

On his return to UK in 1984 he came to specialise in Green and spiritual issues, starting with a series of articles in The Guardian on the elements of Green philosophy which later formed the basis of the Breaking Through book. Since then he has written constantly on Green/spiritual issues in The Guardian, and also in Resurgence and similar publications, and lectured regularly on these themes to university students and Church people.

He is a founding patron of the New Economics Foundation, has stood twice as Green Party candidate in local elections in Essex and is a member of the Ecoropa group of European ecologists.

TESSA TENNANT is best known for her work with the Merlin Ecology Fund (latterly Jupiter Tyndall Merlin). Her early interest in nature (including a passion for birdwatching) was followed by a degree in Human Environmental Studies at King's College, London, during which time she had various summer jobs with environmental organisations such as Ecoropa and CoEnCo. Her family involvement in Liberal politics and the support of Richard Holme led to her taking on the job of Parliamentary liaison for The Green Alliance in the early 1980s.

When she took charge of The Green Alliance's Industry programme, Tessa realised that finance didn't feature very much on the environmental agenda. She therefore spent some time at the Franklin Research and Development Corporation in Boston, Massachusetts, the leading social investment corporation in the USA, where she learned how to research companies from an environmental perspective. Returning to the UK in late 1987 (just after the worldwide stockmarket crash), she had no firm plans, but two project ideas: to research the UK's top 100 companies, and to find fund managers who would back the setting up of a green fund. This led to the launch in 1987 of the Merlin Ecology Fund, for which she became Head of Research. In Spring 1989 the fund was merged with Jupiter Tyndall; and in May this year the Green team of four people were invited with the full corporate backing of National Provident Institution to get a social investment fund on the road.

Tessa has been a pioneer in spreading Green thinking in the City of London, and in enabling people to align their financial needs with their moral concerns, by investing in companies making a contribution to social well-being and the protection and wise use of the natural environment.

THE WOMEN'S ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK (WEN) was set up by Bernadette Vallely in 1988 "to empower , educate and inform women who care about the planet". The organisation has been instrumental in linking environmental problems with practical action by women in the fields of consumer information and health. Under Bernadette's leadership, the organisation has grown into one of Britain's leading environmental pressure groups. WEN has over two hundred affiliated organisations, representing a network of over five million women; the organisation empowers women with emotional, spiritual and political support through running workshops as well as individual counselling. There are local activist groups and over three thousand individual supporters. Campaigns have included chlorine-free paper, minimum packaging, tampon safety, boreal and temperate forest protection, eco-labelling, and actions against dioxins and chloride, chocolate and pesticides.

Although no longer Director, Bernadette is currently a Trustee and is advising and supporting WEN in a new transitional phase for the organisation. Important present projects of WEN include publicity on the Tampon Safety Campaign, highlighting the links between menstruation and tampon-related diseases such as Toxic Shock Syndrome.

Women's Environmental Network, Aberdeen Studios, 22 Highbury Grove, London N5 2EA. Tel 071 354 8823; Fax 071 354 0464. Donations, Publications