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Commonweal Newsletters

Newsletter | Letter from Michael Lerner

December 2005 Commonweal Newsletter Contents:

December 2005

With some trepidation, I want to welcome all of you to the new design of the Commonweal Friends Letter. For many years, I joined all of you in welcoming the twice a year delivery of those sheets of white paper, stapled-together and all text, formatted like a perfect term paper with the Commonweal letterhead at the top. The simplicity of the narrative newsletter served Commonweal well for many years and I believe in honoring what works.

So I worried over whether to impose my own design sensibilities on these pages. At the end of my deliberations, I decided to offer all of you a little bit more of the Commonweal that I see. So there are some photographs of the regeneration of the Commonweal Garden. And a chart of the remarkable growth of the Healer's Art, the medical student education program of ISHI. And the cover of Taking It All In, the report on biomonitoring of Californians that received wonderful press coverage in August. And the image of the front page of the new website of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE).

All of the images in the Commonweal Friends Letter and the design that surrounds them are meant to convey the extraordinary beauty as well as the phenomenal work at Commonweal. As I've settled in as the full-time Executive Director of Commonweal, I've gotten to see so many other pictures:

• Retreat Center Director Jenepher Stowell preparing the flowers before a retreat.
• Commonweal General Manager Waz Thomas tucking in the blankets around Cancer Help Program alumni doing yoga.
• Rachel Naomi Remen and the ISHI staff eating lunch on the deck and laughing.

To this set of concrete buildings on the edge of the American continent come an amazing array of people and from these concrete buildings comes a body of work that is:

• pushing juvenile justice towards justice through the labors of David Steinhart;
• holding back harm to our oceans and the life in them through the efforts of Burr Heneman;
• opening the hearts of medical students and physicians through Rachel Naomi Remen and her staff in ISHI;
• bringing the story of communities living at the fenceline of factories making chemicals through the writing of Steve Lerner;
• planting a new way of connecting human development with the regeneration of the environment through the Commonweal Garden
• and linking the problems of disease and chemical pollution with the solution of safer products and practices through Commonweal's Health and Environment Program's involvement in Health Care Without Harm, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center, the Precautionary Principle and the Collaborative on Health and the Environment.

Supporting these Commonweal efforts in the world outside are the amazing if less visible feats performed by the handful of Commonweal's administrative and support staff. Mark Rafferty and Charlie Brown doing maintenance. Waz Thomas and Jenepher Stowell managing Commonweal and its Retreat Center as well as serving in key roles during the Cancer Help Retreats. Mimi Mindel volunteering her sweet voice on the phones and managing the CanServe Database. Vanessa Marcotte and Rob Fowler writing the checks, keeping the books, and managing our human resources and insurance programs. And Cynthia Loebig serving as administrative assistant to both me and Michael, answering the phone, keeping the supply closet full and being largely responsible for the quality of this newsletter.

The quality and quantity of transformational work put out for the more than $3 million that Commonweal spends every year makes me both proud and humble. I feel so lucky to have been asked to add my efforts to the Commonweal that Michael so elegantly crafted. And I feel so blessed to get to do this work with a healthy Michael Lerner as my colleague and collaborator.

So here's the December 2005 Commonweal Friends Letter. I know it's different but I hope you'll like the difference. Let me know what you think. We've included Michael's Letter at the end in its more traditional format. We didn't want to get too radical.

We've also included an envelope that you can use to make an end of the year donation to Commonweal. Or you can contribute online at www.commonweal.org. Please know how grateful we are for your support.

Have a wonderful holiday season.
The light returns soon.
Charlotte Brody

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics

Commonweal's Charlotte Brody serves on the steering committee of the Safe Cosmetics Campaign (www.safecosmetics.org). That campaign, managed by the Breast Cancer Fund, is having phenomenal success. More than 200 companies have signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics, a pledge to reformulate products to remove chemicals that are dangerous or untested. Campaign partner, the Environmental Working Group has just launched a new version of their interactive website, Skin Deep at www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep2/.

You can find out the safety of the deodorant, shampoo and other personal care products that you and your family use and compare the safety rating to the 14,500 products on the Skin Deep2 website. The 200+ compact signing companies can also use the website to inventory the safety of their product lines so they can plan how to reformulate to meet the Compact's goals.

Health Care Without Harm Adds Food to Its Plate

On November 17, 2005, Health Care Without Harm, Kaiser Permanente and Catholic Healthcare West co-sponsored Food-Med, the first conference on healthy food in healthcare in Oakland, California. The conference planners write:

As places of healing, hospitals have a natural incentive to provide food that is healthy for people and the environment in which we live. By understanding the link between food production and food related disease, health care practitioners can begin to educate their patients, model appropriate food purchasing and help our food production and distribution system transition to one that is protective of human health. The oneday conference is designed to help participants incorporate sustainable and nutritious food purchasing at their facilities, as well as learn about cost effective strategies that emphasize health concerns that meet the unique needs of health care.

Commonheart

by Michael Lerner

One of the most intriguing recent developments at Commonweal is Commonheart, the heart support group that Commonweal co-founder Burr Heneman and I started after my heart attack. Commonheart now offers two well-attended support groups for people in West Marin living with heart disease. Each group gathers for two hours once a month to share experiences of living with heart disease, our self-care recipes, and all the joys and sorrows of life on this particular edge. Commonheart is coordinated by Maria Straatmann, a gifted Commonweal staff member and ex-high tech entrepreneur who now teaches meditation, as well as working with hospice and those facing lifethreatening illness. But Commonheart may be only the beginning of outpatient support programs at Commonweal. We are also contemplating support programs for West Marin residents with cancer and for people facing end of life issues. Maria brings just the right combination of heart and entrepreneurial skills to this important new arena of Commonweal's work.

Collaborative on Health and the Environment

by Michael Lerner

The Collaborative on Health and the Environment continues to be the greatest adventure I have had since we founded the Cancer Help Program. CHE provides Partners with a simple way to track the revolution in environmental health sciences and the individual and collective choices we need to make to achieve a just and sustainable world.

Some recent highlights:

• A conference call by the Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative on the controversy over whether autism can sometimes be reversed by a combination of detoxification, dietary changes, and more traditional behavioral therapies.
• The Vallombrosa Statement by Allison Carlson, Pete Myers and a team from CHE Fertility Working Group is a consensus statement on infertility and pregnancy compromise that is a major contribution to the field.
• A CHE Parkinson's Disease delegation led by CHE-PD coordinator Jackie Hunt Christensen visited the Parkinson's Institute in Sunnyvale, California, where some of the best research on environmental factors in PD is under way. CHE-PD plans to convene PD advocates and scientists at the World Parkinson's Congress this year to advance the PD environmental health research agenda.
• Nancy Evans of The Breast Cancer Fund has led the CHE EMF (electromagnetic fields) Discussion Group in developing a consensus statement on the effects of cell phones, cell towers, wi-fi networks and a new technology that promises to bring wireless access into your home on your power lines, bathing your family in a wi-fi field without your permission and without your capacity to turn it off.
• The publication of a brilliant review of the epidemiological evidence on environmental contaminants in cancer by Richard Clapp at Boston University and a team at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell that deeply challenges the conventional wisdom of some of the national cancer organizations that chemicals play a trivial and insignificant role in cancer. The report was commissioned by the CHE Cancer Working Group.

Now in its fifth year, CHE is approaching 2000 Individual and Organizational Partners from 47 states and 18 countries. The numbers understate the power of CHE. The quality of the Partnership is what matters. Leading scientists, policy makers, patient group leaders, physicians and health professionals, environmental health advocates and community leaders have joined CHE.

Partners join CHE free at CHE's beautiful new website, www.healthandenvironment.org. We promise no more than four emails a month. You are invited on an hour-long high quality CHE Partner Call each month where leading scientists, policy analysts, and patient or community representatives discuss a critical environmental health issue. If you want to delve deeper, CHE has seven working or discussion groups on science, learning and developmental disabilities, fertility and pregnancy compromise, cancer, asthma, Parkinson's Disease and electromagnetic fields (EMF).

CHE also has regional CHE Partnerships in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington state, and will this year develop Partnerships in New York, Vermont and Alaska. CHE also has a very strong presence in California and Massachusetts, where interest in environmental health is high.

The CHE staff, which we keep as lean as possible, continues to grow. Susan West Marmagas, formerly director of the environment program at Physicians for Social Responsibility, has joined CHE as Director of Health Programs. Susan remains based in Washington, where she heads CHE's new D.C. office. Julia Varshavsky, a brilliant recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley, has joined National Coordinator Eleni Sotos and Administrative Specialist Frieda Nixdorf on the CHE team. Davis Baltz, Charlotte Brody, Steve Heilig, Elise Miller, Sharyle Patton and Ted Schettler, M.D., and I make up the rest of the core CHE team.

CHE would not be possible without the remarkable support we have received from the foundation community. Recent renewal of support, the strongest endorsement we can ask for, has come from the Beldon Fund and the Cedar Tree Foundation. We are fortunate to have existing grants from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the John Merck Fund and the California Environmental Health Tracking Program and other foundations that prefer to remain anonymous.

Cancer Help Program

Like a River: The Experience of Deborah Mosley with Breast Cancer

by Michael Lerner

In October, we held the 125th Commonweal Cancer Help Program and the 1000th participant attended the weeklong retreat. The retreat was, like so many before it, a real beauty. For many years, a limitation of writing to you about the Cancer Help Program has been the bond of confidentiality that we have about the retreats. I realized on this retreat that some participants are writing for publication and might be open to describing their personal experiences. Such was the case with Deborah Mosley, a 37 year-old attorney from San Francisco with metastatic breast cancer, who came on this retreat. Deborah kindly agreed to share some of her writing, including this poem written during the Cancer Help Program.

Here is an excerpt from Deborah's autobiographical work on her experience with breast cancer:

More Like a River

I realized I had been living with cancer for five years when I was digging through the hall closet pulling out empty luggage and stumbled across my briefcase. Inside, the remnants of my life as a lawyer. It feels like a long time ago, practicing law. When I caught sight of a certain folded-up sheet of paper, I knew instantly what it was - the survival statistics my oncologist handed down five years ago. According to the stat sheet, a woman with my specs (stage II breast cancer; moderately differentiated, multifocal, lobular, invasive carcinoma; 3 of 15 lymph nodes positive for cancer...) had, in theory, only a 10-11% chance of recurrence at five years after submitting to all the initial treatments. Even now I remember how I watched the tip of her pen as it ran across that page, waiting to see what my odds were. Everywhere I went, I carried that stat sheet around with me like some kind of insurance policy. To and from work every day, on business trips, to depositions, everywhere. I even pulled it out once or twice to prove to people that my odds really were good. "Relax; I'm gonna be fine. See?"

I learned on October 20, 2003 that my cancer was back. (I was the lucky one in ten, though I didn't get the benefit of five full years.) It was a bone scan. Actually, I was pretty certain about it back in June, four months earlier. Another bone scan. I was just shy of 35 years old then and had fallen down twice in a week. I had some hip pain too, felt like my joints were all dried up and the bones were grinding together. My left hip in particular. My right one didn't start hurting until sometime later. I hadn't told anyone. Bone pain scares people. Hell, it scares me. Though I did mention having had some knee pain the year before; I talked about the fear then. Strangely silent this time around. Jinx. I kept thinking it would feel better in a day or two. "It's probably nothing anyway." I'd just had my check-up a few weeks before. Apparently, I "looked great." As if breast cancer were acne. Of course I looked great. I looked great the day I was first diagnosed too. Thirtyone years old then.

So I went in for the bone scan in June 2003. Falling down isn't just falling down anymore and hip pain isn't just hip pain. Not after diagnosis. I'm on the table; the scan hovers less that an inch above my nose before it starts moving millimeter by millimeter down the length of my body to my toes. When the scan finally stops, the twenty-something technician calls in the Big Guy, a grey-haired radiologist with tenure. This can't be good. Never has been.

My hips "look fine." Imagine that. A little osteopenic maybe, but nothing out of the ordinary for someone who was artificially propelled into menopause at age 31.

"Are you having pain anywhere else?" he asked.

Oh god. Here we go.

"Well, my back hurts, but I think that's pretty normal for a lawyer," I said, and added a nervous little laugh.

"Where exactly on your back?" (Absence of laughter duly noted.)

I reached out and motioned for the tech to step a little closer, then I gently turned him around so his back was facing me. "If he were an angel, it would be right here, where his wing would attach," and I circled a spot on his right scapula that mirrored where my back had been burning. I wasn't in the habit of referencing angels, so I have no idea where that came from, and it certainly wasn't any false bravado on my part. In fact, I made the analogy to an angel's wing before I even had time to think of the implications. Then I saw it register in their eyes; on some deep level I already knew what their machine was telling them on a computer screen some twenty feet across the room. We held the silence for a moment. Turns out a onecentimeter spot showed up on my right scapula, right where my right wing would attach. Though I've usually found that knowing something is much better than before the knowing - when the fear grows and spreads in other-worldly ways like a nightmare - my doctors tried desperately to attribute the finding to some other cause, anything but cancer...

"Well, you probably suffered some kind of sports injury. You're very active, and if we gave a bone scan to every person off the street" (meaning, every person without cancer) "something like this would pop up from time to time. Your bones suffer injuries, then your bones heal. Let's scan again in six months, and chances are, it won't show up at all."

I suppose I was willing to wait - four months, not six - because I really wanted them to be right, though I knew damn well that I hadn't been whacked in the back with a golf club (or its equivalent) since my last bone scan.

When we did the follow-up scan in October, the one centimeter spot had become a five centimeter spot. We had our answer: sports injuries don't grow.

I immediately suggested we remove my right scapula, maybe replace it with a metal plate or something; voila, no more cancer! It didn't matter to me that if we went ahead with my plan, my right arm would dangle uselessly at my side for the rest of my life. Just get the cancer the fuck out. My Bone Doctor dismissed the idea without much explanation; it seemed to make him very uncomfortable to see me still holding out so much hope that I might someday be cancer free. Chances are, I won't.

Come to find out, the bones are much more like a river than you might think; cancer cells in one bone flow freely to the other bones in the body. Translation: taking out my right scapula wouldn't mean a damn thing in terms of my survival. I'd need a systemic treatment, not a local one.

I lasted only a few days at work before I went out on disability. I took my briefcase and my stat sheet with me when I left. I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't get my mind off my cancer so I walked out of the office and had a bone biopsy the next week. The Bone Doctor removed a small portion of my right scapula and some of the surrounding soft tissue. (Did you catch that? He took a piece of my shoulder blade with him when he left.)

The biopsy confirmed the diagnosis.

Even before we had the results, I knew it was cancer and I knew it had spread to my liver. A sharp, stabbing pain tore through the right side of my abdomen while I was window-shopping in the Castro. Before I felt that pain, I didn't even know where my liver was. Seriously. I took a few more steps and was stabbed twice for my trouble. Reflexively, I grabbed my right side, bent over at the waist, and said, "****[Expletive omitted/ML] This can't be good." Never has been.

I immediately reported the pain to my oncologist...She went ahead and sent me for an abdominal CAT scan (a.k.a. "AB CT"). According to the scan report, "the liver demonstrates multiple low attenuated lesions in both lobes of the liver...they are representative of metastatic disease." There it was, my breast cancer had put its feet up in my liver in complete and utter disregard of all boundaries, borders and zoning regulations.

On the upside, the MRI of my brain and the X-ray of my lungs came out clean; no signs of misfit cells pitching tents without permits there. (I'm only willing to mention this last little bit of good fortune in a whisper, just in case the damn thing is listening.)

Copyright © 2005 by Deborah A. Mosley

And here are a few of Deborah's thoughts on the Cancer Help Program:

Before I went to Commonweal, I walked around holding an X-ray up to the sun, looking for answers and looking for trouble. When I tired of the X-ray, I held my left femur up; it's got a good-size hole in it, big enough to see through if you close one eye. I looked out at the world that way -- that was the picture frame, those were the limits.

At Commonweal, we held hands a lot. We put our hands together for blessings and for high fives. We wrapped our hands around each other and we let our hands run rampant in the sand. We wrestled with life and death and love and loss and we grappled with the words to describe it all. We were swinging from banisters, holding tightly to kite strings, and looking for bugs under rocks.

My hands were too busy for holding up X-rays and clinging to picture frame bones. And they still are. Sometimes you have to loosen your grip to get a better hold.

Reflections on the Healing Power of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program

Those of us who staff the Cancer Help Program have had the privilege of hearing stories like Deborah's story one thousand times over the past twenty years. The individual, collective, and cumulative power of these thousand stories has changed our lives, as well as the lives of so many alumnae of the Cancer Help Program.

What makes Cancer Help Programs so powerful? Even after 20 years, I confess I can only offer hunches on the subject. I have long thought that the power of the retreats stems in part from the willingness of the eight participants to find a way to work together that enables everyone to go deeper and further in healing work than they could possibly go alone.

On every Cancer Help Program, most participants find what they came for: deep healing that changes their lives; new understanding of therapy choices; new ways of dealing with pain and suffering; or new ways of living with the prospect of death and dying.

On most retreats, there are also usually two or three participants, at least, who have come with a great sense of urgency, often related to a new development in their cancer, to do fundamental inner work, and who find the conditions that make that work possible. Their deep inner work evokes the potential to go deeper for other participants, who may have come at a less urgent moment in their personal journeys. Participation in a fundamentally collaborative experience in which such life-changing work is done evokes awe and gratitude whether you are the person who works at that depth or not. In a profound sense, the healing of one of us evokes healing in us all.

One thing we see on every retreat is that participants become more youthful. People commonly look five years younger when they leave than when they arrived. Pale, wan, troubled faces relax and fill with vitality as the week progresses. What the facial rejuvenation connotes to me is a rejuvenation of the whole body - it is just the face that we see. What effect that rejuvenation of the body has on the course of the disease is, of course, something we cannot know. We do know that many cancers are diseases that increase in frequency with aging. What can happen to the progression or recurrence of cancer when people are relaxed and rejuvenated physically would be an interesting research question.

We also come to love each other in the course of the week. Participants frequently comment on how astonished they are by the depth of the connections they make. Eight complete strangers, who would never otherwise meet and would rarely seek each other out as friends, have by the end of the week shared experiences they have never told anyone about before. In the sharing of stories of life on the edge, we come to see each other from the heart. Love, Rachel Naomi Remen says, is not an emotion. It is a way of seeing from the heart. When we see from the heart, all the judgments we make when we see from the mind drop away.

Most participants in the Cancer Help Program are women. Many have not had this experience of being cooked for, massaged, cared for, seen for who they truly are, listened to, and loved in this way, for a very long time. Some have never had a week like this in their whole lives. The experience, for both men and women, but perhaps particularly for women, evokes a safe place for inner exploration unlike any other they have ever experienced.

I am a great believer in the power of the importance of shared intention in group healing work. The participants do not just show up for a nice week off. They come with a cancer diagnosis, more often than not a life-threatening diagnosis. They face either the possibility of recurrence or the fact of recurrence. And they often feel a profound - sometimes even a desperate - need to find the deepest possible healing.

The power of the participants' individual and collective intention to use the week for deep healing meets the power of the individual and collective staff intention to support the optimal conditions for deep healing. These twenty individual and collective intentions form a vortex of healing energy of extraordinary power. This power must be handled with great gentleness, with deep respect, with exceptional care. The unfolding trust and openness also creates vulnerability. The softness that comes with relaxation and love is tender. The week should be, if at all possible, both powerful and gentle. It almost always is.

Then there is the place itself. Commonweal. This ancient Native American ground at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. This old antenna site that had the perfect electromagnetic characteristics to build the Marconi Wireless Station from which transmissions across the Pacific Ocean began. This place where thirty-one years ago a younger man had an intuition that a community of us might co-create a center for work in personal and planetary healing. This place where for thirty years more than one hundred souls, mostly natives of West Marin, have labored to cultivate a field where work like this could be done.

The three decades of healing work that have hallowed this place is nothing compared to the awesome healing power of nature, which has created its own vortex of incomparable vital energy where the greatest ocean on earth meets the North American continent, where towering cliffs stand sentinel over unspoiled beaches, where the owls and the deer, the fox and the rabbits, the possums, the skunks, the pelicans, the sea otters, the sharks, and all the other creatures still dance together the desperate, urgent dance of life and death to which we, too, were born and in which, we too, do die.

Thank you friends, for continuing to support the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, and indeed for supporting all our work at Commonweal. The Cancer Help Program is literally your gift to the thousand people who have come to this quiet place in search of healing. We bow our heads to you in gratitude.

What's New at the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness

From Christina Tucker, ISHI Program Manager

ISHI Director, Rachel Naomi Remen tells how: "As a child, I spent almost every Saturday in my father's pharmacy, listening to him answer and ease people's fears; and watching him make pills and lotions and ointments. When he died, hundreds of people came to his funeral. My mother received cards for over a year, from people who wanted her to know how much his kindness and listening had meant to them. She carried one of those notes in her purse for a long time. It was a simple white card that said, 'Your husband was a blessing.'

So it means a great deal to us at ISHI to let you know that the UCSF School of Pharmacy will be offering the Healer's Art curriculum to their pharmacy students in the winter quarter of 2006 for the very first time. This all came about as a result of a keynote speech that Rachel gave in 2004, in honor of her father. She spoke to the deans of all the American pharmacy schools at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy meeting. The enthusiasm with which the Healer's Art curriculum was received by these academics was a great surprise. Dean Koda-Kimble at UCSF School of Pharmacy is now committed to disseminating the Healer's Art for Pharmacy curriculum to pharmacy schools nationwide, much in the same way the Healer's Art curriculum has been disseminated by medical schools across the country.

ISHI has piloted a new six-hour Healer's Art module for fourth-year medical students to seventy-five American Medical Student Association (AMSA) senior students from all over the country. Their input has been invaluable in helping us design a curriculum to serve medical students who are about to graduate. In 2005 we offered this course for the first time to UCSF students who gave it rave reviews - the most positive evaluations possible. We now have a syllabus and resource guide for this new curriculum and have distributed it to all national course directors who are trained to teach the Healer's Art to first and second year medical students. You could say that this new curriculum module immunizes students with the lineage of medicine just before they graduate.

It is truly amazing to realize that this is the fourteenth year that ISHI is gearing up to offer the Healer's Art at the UCSF School of Medicine. Some of the students currently signed up for this curriculum were ten years old when ISHI started its first course at UCSF. And now we are not alone. There are over forty schools across the country that are trained to offer the Healer's Art curriculum to their students. Last year over seven hundred students took the course. When we remember that each one of these students will see over 200,000 patients in their medical lifetime; we know the work is making a difference.

Our programs for the public and for graduate health professionals have expanded as well. Last year ISHI piloted a new workshop format for large numbers of people at a local small hotel. These workshops have been deeply gratifying. In 2005 sixty physicians came to retrieve the heart and soul of their work; eighty nurses, doctors and social workers spent three days telling mystery stories; and forty physicians explored the mystery and awe in their practice of medicine. Ninety-nine percent of the evaluations from these workshops were highly positive and this has changed our ideas about what kinds of programs can transform and serve people.

We are also proud to say that our first Finding Meaning in Medicine Workshop led by Bob Rufsvold and Matt Zwerling this past summer was a great success. Sixteen physicians from all over the country came together in a discovery model to explore the meaning of their work. We continue to get letters and emails from these past workshop participants, letting us know the profound changes they have been able to make as a result of the workshop. This new workshop has had a great impact and we hope to offer it as a regular part of ISHI's service to doctors. Here are a few examples of doctors' descriptions of the workshop: "The most powerful experience of my professional life." "This is the most important work being done in healthcare right now." "The FMM movement has the potential to 'heal' medicine. It gives us all hope."

ISHI's work continues to reach wider and wider circles of people. In a recent talk on philanthropy, Bill Moyers included a story from Rachel's best selling book Kitchen Table Wisdom. Oprah included Rachel's article in her first annual Book of Best Articles from O and Rachel was also interviewed for O's recent issue on graceful aging. Reformed Judaism featured an interview with Rachel about choices at the end of life. ISHI even got flown around the country. In their September Insight Magazine, USAir published an interview with Rachel entitled 'The Healer's Art'. And locally, San Francisco Medicine Magazine included a full interview/ article with Rachel as the lead for its September issue on medical education. We even made it onto your computer. There are two web TV interviews with Rachel now available for those who would like to listen: "Listening Generously: The Healing Stories of Rachel Naomi Remen" on Speaking of Faith/American Public Media: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio. org [no www] (search = The Healing Stories of Rachel Naomi Remen) and "Becoming a Blessing" on UCTV: www.uctv.tv/podcasts (search = Rachel Naomi Remen).

It has been a very full year and we are grateful for the support and colleagueship that will enable us to do this all again in 2006; including the Flow Fund, the George Family Foundation, the Osher Foundation, and the M.A.C.H Foundation.

Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center

by Sharyle Patton & Davis Baltz

Biomonitoring is an important scientific tool that provides essential information about how much of the polluting chemicals that are in the air, the water, the food we eat and the products we use every day end up being taken into our bodies. Learning more is what biomonitoring is all about, and will bring new insights and solutions to the health problems we all face today.

In its first full year, the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center concentrated its activities on two primary projects. The first was conducting a biomonitoring study of a dozen prominent Californians, measuring the levels of 25 chemicals in six different categories in their bodies, and giving them the opportunity to respond in their own words.

The study cohort was comprised of individuals, well known in their fields, who are known for their integrity, wisdom, and commitment to community health and justice. All participants had detectable levels of at least one chemical in each of the six chemical categories.

We hope the study report, Taking It All In - Documenting Chemical Pollution in Californians Through Biomonitoring, will catalyze public discussion about how California can use biomonitoring as a public health tool. The report is available on Commonweal's website, Click here for more information »

The second core project was co-sponsorship with the Breast Cancer Fund of Senate Bill 600, the Healthy Californians Biomonitoring Program, in the California legislature. The bill successfully passed the Senate and Assembly, but was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger.

Authored by Senators Deborah Ortiz and Don Perata, the bill was a science-based program that would have created the nation's first statewide biomonitoring program, giving the state the capacity to measure environmental chemicals in the bodies of Californians.

The resulting data would promote state interests by helping us understand chemical exposure trends, which would better inform environmental health decision-making in California. This in turn could save the state millions of dollars in healthcare costs and environmental remediation.

Notably, the Chamber of Commerce removed SB 600 from its "job killer" list and took a neutral position on the bill, while the federal Centers for Disease Control offered a minimum of $1.7 million of in-kind testing and training services to California to support biomonitoring. Despite these important mainstream signals of support, Governor Schwarzenegger chose to veto the bill, laying bare his close ties to the influence of the chemical industry, which consistently opposed SB 600.

The Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center is facing a busy year ahead with additional opportunities to biomonitor decision leaders, to support community- based biomonitoring initiatives, and to continue to raise awareness about the value of biomonitoring as a scientific tool that protects environmental health.

Commonweal Garden

Penny Livingston-Stark and James Stark
Co-Directors of Regenerative Design Institute

We have had an amazing year since moving into the Commonweal Garden last December and are so grateful to be living in such a beautiful ocean paradise.

This year we launched our new nonprofit organization The Regenerative Design Institute (RDI). RDI is committed to reestablishing a collaborative connection between humanity and the Earth by offering new models of ecological education and leadership training that creates multi-disciplinary practitioners skilled in the art and science of regenerative design and nature awareness.

Our goal is to spread the awareness that we can design and build development models worldwide that address human needs while regenerating the surrounding environment to become more fertile and diverse in the process. Achieving this goal requires a new model of education that creates strong community leaders while providing design and skills training relevant to the future survival of humanity on the Earth.

The RDI programs are designed for educators, designers, farmers, trades-people, facilitators and community leaders but we also have programs for students and homeowners who wish to transform their relationship to the earth and to make a difference in the world. If you would like more information on our programs please check out our web site www.regenerativedesign. org or call us at 415 868-9681.

In January, we began our education programming at the Commonweal Garden with Wilderness Awareness trainings and began our 4 seasons Permaculture Design Course that takes place one Saturday or Sunday a month for a year. The 30 participants have been doing hands-on work in the garden and attending classes in the main Commonweal building.

In the winter, we also held a beekeeping workshop where we built 22 beehives. We kept 5 hives and the rest went home with the workshop participants. Our bees arrived the following week during our 5-day Permaculture course for New College students and we were able to introduce the bees to their new hives with the help of the students.

This spring we held our two-week residential permaculture design course, hosted an afternoon during Commonweal's 30th anniversary celebration, started our second year-long 4 seasons course, held a 4-day workshop for 50 participants with David Holmgren, the co-founder of Permaculture, and provided a venue for two gatherings of the forming Bay Area elders council.

At the end of August, we held a weekend focused on the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) democratic system of governance and the Peacemaker principles taught by Jon Young. (Some scholars have described the Haudenosaunee version of Democracy as the oldest, longest continuously functioning and purest form of Democracy on the earth today.) This peacemaker weekend launched a new innovative yearlong program called RDNA - Regenerative Design and Nature Awareness.

This fall we began our site tours with a visit from The Green Belt Alliance group and the Alameda Waste Management organization that brought out their star recycling citizens as a reward for their efforts composting and recycling waste and therefore protecting their watershed and helping clean the San Francisco Bay.

We hope that gives you at least a flavor of the educational programs that we are providing.

As for the garden, we now have our winter garden in, apples and pears have been preserved for the winter and last week we delivered our first produce to the Commonweal kitchen for retreat guests. We have been making some goat cheese from our first arrival of goats and our chickens are happily generating our breakfast eggs.

We are in the midst of our second stage of retrofitting our infrastructure, repairing the buildings, fences, power lines and driveway and creating homes for the arrival of new farm animals. With our nonprofit institution RDI in place, we are now able to accept donations via our website for anyone wishing to contribute to the development of the garden infrastructure. With the completion of this work we will be better able to meet the food needs of the Commonweal staff, retreat participants and the Bolinas community.

Students creating a herbal spiral garden

We are happy to announce that we recently moved our RDI office from Point Reyes Station to the Commonweal Main Office Building.

To conclude, we would like to say that without the help, encouragement and support of the Commonweal staff all of this work would not have been possible. In addition to a heartfelt thank you to Michael Lerner and Charlotte Brody, we would like to express our deep appreciation to the Compton Foundation, Peter Barnes, Cornelia Durrant and all the students and volunteers who have helped the Commonweal Garden grow.

Juvenile Justice Program

In 2005, the Juvenile Justice Program expanded its efforts on behalf of children confined in secure juvenile detention facilities. This work is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has taken the lead nationally to improve care and conditions in these lockups for kids.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that children (unlike adults) have no constitutional right to bail upon arrest. The core case from the High Court, a 1984 decision penned by former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, held that juvenile pre-trial detention (without bail) is justified by the state's interest in protecting children from harm--despite significant evidence of abuse, injury and suicide suffered by children detained for behaviors ranging from curfew violations to homicide.

On behalf of the Casey Foundation, Juvenile Justice Program Director David Steinhart has served as a Technical Assistance advisor in five Western states in 2005, helping them devise risk assessment instruments (to ground detention decisions in objective criteria) and helping them establish alternative-to-detention programs. Recently, the Foundation asked Steinhart to write a manual on juvenile detention risk screening for national distribution; the first draft of this publication was submitted in October. The Casey initiative is active in 15 states and the District of Columbia. Subject to grant renewals, we expect Commonweal's work on detention reform will continue in 2006.

In June, the California Wellness Foundation renewed our grant on youth violence prevention for three years. Recently, we participated in a forum convened by Attorney General Bill Lockyer at U.C. Berkeley (linked to a statewide webcast) to discuss the disturbing rise in gang violence and youth gun deaths in Los Angeles and other urban sites. Interestingly, these gang crime hotspots, highlighted by press and broadcast coverage, are a counter-trend to the continuing, long-term slide in California juvenile arrests for crimes of violence. California violent crime rates for juveniles have stayed even lower than the comparable rates for adults. Nevertheless, citizens in places like Compton, Richmond and San Francisco Bayview have cause for alarm, and we will be working with the Wellness Foundation, and with state and local policymakers, to track these trends and to recommend public policy responses in the months ahead.

Fair Growth Project

Deadlines loom. By the end of November, Commonweal Research Director Steve Lerner will have finished a rough draft of his book "Smart Growth/Fair Growth: Building Mixed- Income Communities. Dismantling Racial and Economic Segregation in the United States." The book will then be sent out for editing and comment before being submitted to publishers.

Steve begins a new project in early December with the Annie E. Casey Foundation and will spend six months writing about a variety of juvenile detention reform issues. First on the list is an exploration of the special challenges posed by providing appropriate detention services in rural counties. As it stands now, many rural counties do not have adequate juvenile detention facilities and, as a result, youth awaiting trial are often sent to adult facilities or to urban facilities where they are mixed in with more violent offenders. This is a recipe for disaster. For example, a youth detained in a rural area for stealing a bike may find himself locked up with much more violent offenders making him vulnerable to both attack and corruption. Some rural counties are joining together and pooling their resources to build appropriate detention facilities and creating a network of alternative programs that divert some of the less serious property offenders into less restrictive environments. Lerner will visit and write about some of the most innovative rural detention programs currently underway.

Steve is also in the early stages of seeking support for a two-year research and writing project about fenceline and disease-cluster communities around the nation. While the thinking about this project is still in a formative phase, the basic idea is to profile 12 fenceline communities where residents live adjacent to highly toxic industries, some of which are also experiencing disease clusters. This will be a follow-up to his book, Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor, which was published by MIT Press last March and has just gone into its third printing. The "Fenceline America" project will describe the disproportionate exposure to toxic chemicals that residents of fenceline communities experience; look at possible remedies including buffer zones, relocation programs, and stricter environmental enforcement; and provide a map and an appendix of where these communities are located.

With Gratitude

We express our deep gratitude to the following foundations that have supported Commonweal this year:

We offer special thanks and gratitude to the following Commonweal Friends for their generous contributions during the last six months:

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