Janine Selendy

The Solutions Site was conceived and produced by Janine Selendy.

Janine Selendy is Founder, Chairman and President of HORIZON International, an international not-for-profit research, development and film production organization based at Yale university and in Sweden, with office and substantial faculty involvement from Harvard, and several forthcoming international bases including at the Universidad Agraria in Peru and in Poland and Hungary. She founded HORIZON with the help of a think tank of diverse experts.

HORIZON is dedicated to fostering solutions to problems in the areas of health, environment, development and population by maximizing the use of knowledge of what can be and is being done to protect and improve life on earth. It has 25 years experience in searching in all parts of the world for both high and low technology solutions to help protect and improve life on earth, documenting their validity and feasibility with the help of HORIZON's Scientific Review Board and other experts, and making the solutions available for others to benefit by disseminating the information through the HORIZON Solutions Site, with local help of HORIZON Solutions Site Interns and Research Fellows, and through HORIZON's international television series, ONE SECOND BEFORE SUNRISE, other multimedia material.

She brought together the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and UN Population Fund (UNFPA), to collaborate with HORIZON Communications on the Site along with Yale University and HORIZON's colleagues at Harvard University. The Site now has more than 125 cooperating organizations including international multimedia and Associates in more than 35 countries. It is being use by more than 9,000 people a month and has over 150,000 hits per month.

She supervised all aspects of the television productions of HORIZON's international television series, One Second Before Sunrise and other multimedia materials including as producer or co-producer and director, and established co-production arrangements with major television stations in Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Poland, the Peoples' Republic of China and other entities.

Ten years ago, she developed major collaborations with Harvard and Yale universities which have been provided offices and assistance to HORIZON, and formed HORIZON's Scientific Review Board bringing together renowned scientists and other experts to provide advice and review all material produced by HORIZON before it is disseminated.

She established the HORIZON's Solutions Databank and its recent incarnation, the international HORIZON Solutions Site which presents readily accessible peer reviewed answers to problems in population, environment, health, and development. To maximize the scope and effectiveness of the Solutions Site, she established major collaborations for the Solutions Site, involving, in addition to Harvard and Yale, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Population Fund (UNFPA), and Unicef.

For her wide range of consultancy and speaking engagements, she has drawn upon her various talents and experiences from her early years with medical and health concerns, which began when she was 16 years old assisting an Indian doctor and his wife with medical outreach to the poor in Teheran, Iran, to her work in communities in Appalachian, Ohio where she started a very successful county-wide clean-up campaign and supervised a glass reclamation center started by teenagers to whom she had lectured about the world environment situation and bringing into the community mentally retarded individuals from their sequestered institutional life to help sort and crush glass for the recycling center, from her work with energy policy for the State to New York to her roles in helping bring about the successful stopping of PCBs release into the Hudson River and the closing down of the West Valley Nuclear Storage Facility which was leaking tritium and strontium 90 into a creek affecting the drinking water of 10 million inhabitants of Buffalo, New York.

During her youth she made a minor discovery in cancer research at the Tufts-New England Medical Center and worked in maternal health specifically with the research and preparation of an article for the Journal of Diabetes. Over the years, she worked locally, nationally, and internationally in all the areas covered by HORIZON and the HORIZON Solutions Site with major emphases in population, energy, coral reefs, sustainable development, public health and species preservation.

She has been consultant to, among others: the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University; the President's Council on Sustainable Development and Population; the Pacific Basin Research Center (PBRC) of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; the World Health Organization; the World Bank; the Communications for Conservation organization (COMCON)of Southeast Asia; and for the Government of Pakistan. She was credited with aiding in the establishment of a National Environmental Protection Agency as a result of consultations with several Pakistani leaders.

Her speaking engagements and roles on panels are equally diverse from the World Bank's Fifth Annual World Bank Conference on Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development: Coral Reefs and the United Nations International conferences on Population and Development and on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) to engagements with Garden Clubs of America and Rotarians, radio show and for the Electrical Engineering Society of New York State and League of Women Voters.

She was editor-in-chief of an environmental newspaper, author of numerous papers, conference leader, and initiator of many successful projects.

Janine Selendy was named a Fellow National of the Explorers Club in 1997 is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a member of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities.

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