Safer Chemistry Impact Fund Appoints First Fund Director
Bill Walsh, a nationally recognized non-profit leader in safer chemistry, will lead the first-of-its-kind fund to mobilize investment in safer chemical adoption to benefit people and the planet.
March 12, 2024 - The Board of Advisors of the Safer Chemistry Impact Fund today announced Bill Walsh as the founding Fund Director. The new fund, announced February 28, 2024, aims to raise at least $15 million over the next five years to accelerate the industry’s transition to safer chemistry. With over 25 years of nonprofit leadership experience in the environmental health movement, Walsh has a proven track record of launching innovative multi-stakeholder initiatives to promote transparency and healthier materials.
In this new role, Walsh will provide strategic leadership to operationalize the Safer Chemistry Impact Fund and serve as a liaison with government, finance, philanthropy, and NGOs to promote alignment of sector initiatives.
As Founder of the Healthy Building Network (2000-2022), he oversaw the development and launch of the Pharos Project, a non-profit database providing the most robust hazard, use, and exposure information on over 200,000 chemicals and building products. Today Pharos provides hazard data to support ChemFORWARD’s safer alternatives data set. Walsh was also a founding board member of the Health Product Declaration® (HPD) Open Standard, the first standard format for accurately, reliably, and consistently reporting the material contents of a building product, and associated health information. He is a Fellow of the Lowell Center for Sustainable Production, one of the earliest academic centers dedicated to advancing chemical hazard reduction strategies with industry. He served as a founding Advisory Board member to the Safer Chemistry Impact Fund In 2023. Immediately before joining the Safer Chemistry Impact Fund, Walsh was the Executive Director of the Passport Foundation, a San Francisco-based philanthropy supporting numerous environmental health non-profits in the US.
“The Safer Chemistry Impact Fund aims to overcome the single greatest impediment to the widespread adoption of safer chemistries in manufacturing: a lack of health data about the thousands of available chemicals and formulations,” said Walsh. “We now have proven infrastructure in place that can systematically tackle this challenge.”
Walsh further noted that safer chemistry is also the key to unlocking truly sustainable solutions to the climate and plastics crises. “We cannot reduce our reliance on petrochemical products without safer and, ultimately, truly sustainable chemicals that are manufactured according to the principles of green chemistry. The fund will strategically deploy capital to scale solutions to meet the urgency of these challenges,” said Walsh.
The Safer Chemistry Impact Fund is fiscally sponsored by the Windward Fund. Advisory Board members include Art Fong, Technical Leader for Smarter Chemistry at Apple, Mike Werner, Head of Sustainability Programs and Innovation - Global Sustainability at Google, and Renee Hackenmiller-Paradis, Senior Director, Chemicals Management at lululemon. Their statements on the fund are available here. Seed funding has been provided by Apple, Google, and the Forsythia Foundation.
Organizations interested in implementing and investing in safer chemistry adoption are encouraged to contact the Fund Director at info@saferchemistryimpactfund.org.