In August 2004, six Latin American and Canadian participants of the Ecosystem Approach to Human Health and Neurotoxics Working Group (EAHHNWG) convened in Santiago de Chile to draft a proposal for the Global Community of Practice in Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health (CoPEH) - Latin American and Caribbean communities, which was submitted August 25, 2004. It was at this first meeting that we decided to progressively build a community of practice using the EcoHealth approach to address toxic substances in the Americas based on a structure involving regional nodes. The preparation of this document was a true collaboration between all partners, the process and results of which gave everyone the aspiration to continuing working together.

(Draft workshop in Santiago de Chile, August 2004. From left: Donna Mergler, Ineke Wesseling, Ruth Arroyo Aguilar, Oscar Betancourt, Julia Medel, and Mario Henry Rodríguez; photo: Jena Webb)

In December 2004, we were invited, as one among four groups, to submit a second, more detailed proposal. In February 2005, an expanded core group of eight met in Alajuela, Costa Rica after the Third Occupational and Environmental Health in the Americas Conference to prepare the second proposal. In June 2005, we learned that we had been selected to manage the CoPEH-LAC. We began operating in January 2006, at which point we had our first official CoPEH-TLAC meeting in Lima.