Jonathan Parfrey

Jonathan Parfrey

Jonathan Parfrey is the founder of Climate Resolve.

Bio

From the Climate Resolve website:

Before founding Climate Resolve, Jonathan Parfrey served as a commissioner at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (2008-2013). Jonathan is a member of the LA28 Olympics Sustainability Working Group. He is a founder and board member of CicLAvia, the popular street event, as well as a founder of the statewide Alliance of Regional Collaboratives for Climate Adaptation. He served as director of the GREEN LA Coalition (2007-2011) and as the Los Angeles director of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization Physicians for Social Responsibility (1994 to 2007). Prior to that, Jonathan founded and directed the Orange County Catholic Worker (1987-1993). He was appointed to Governor Schwarzenegger’s Environmental Policy Team in 2003.

Jonathan received the Paul S. Delp Award for Outstanding Service, Peace, and Social Justice (1992), was awarded a Durfee Foundation Fellowship (2002), a Stanton Fellowship (2010), and was appointed a Senior Fellow at the USC Marshall School of Business (2011). He is currently an advisory board member at the UCLA Center for Healthy Climate Solutions; a fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities; a member of the State of California Climate Adaptation Technical Advisory Council (2016); a member of the steering committee for the US Climate and Health Alliancen(2016); a member of the steering committee of the Tiüac’a’ai Healthy Land Project of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians; and an advisory board member at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. In April 2016, he received the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Chair’s Green Leadership Award. When he’s not at work, Jonathan likes to hang out with his wife, Nancy L. Cohen, his four children, and four grandchildren, as well as going with friends on epic hikes and bike rides.

Peace activism

Christina Walsh, Jonathan Parfrey and William Preston Bowling with the Jonathan Parfrey Book Collection donated by PSR-LA and Associate Director Denise Duffield.

A founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1961, Sol Londe M.D. was also, a long-time Los Angeles chapter board member. Sol Londe met his wife, Jeanne Londe, also a PSR-LA board member, at a 1983 disarmament protest. Their wedding cake was appropriately decorated with a peace symbol.

In the 1980′s Sol was the group’s most popular speaker. He lectured in schools, at Elks Club meetings and elsewhere about the effects of nuclear testing on human health. PSR-LA director Jonathan Parfrey remembered Londe at a memorial service at Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills. “Sol had an unquenchable hope in people and their ability to right social structures. His faith out-stripped that of religious devotees. Sol believed peace and justice could be won here and now.”

"Sol was politically active; that was the crux of his life," said Dr. Richard Saxon, a fellow member of the group and a longtime friend. "He was concerned about the social side of science and medicine. For us, nuclear destruction is a medical issue."