Commonweal Newsletters
Newsletter | Letter from Michael Lerner
December 2006 Commonweal Newsletter Contents:
Introduction by Charlotte BrodyCollaborative on Health and Environment on Steep Ascending Growth Curve
Susan Braun Launches Fund for Women's Health at Commonweal
News from the Commonweal Garden
News about the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness
Chemical Contamination in Fenceline Communities
Juvenile Justice Program Director David Steinhart is Named to Two California Advisory Groups
Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center
Cancer Help Program: Seven Days Of Healing
EARTH SPIRIT
With Gratitude
SAVE THE DATE!
December 2006
Biomonitoring Bill is Signed into Law
(Foreground, from right: Senator Perata, Governor Schwarzenegger, Sharyle Patton, Commonweal, Senator Ortiz, and Jeanne Rizzo, Breast Cancer Fund. Background, from right: Janet Nudleman, BCF, Sheila Brown, BCF, and Pam Tazioli, BCF)
Photo by Michael Rauner
Dear friends,
I like proofreading. And I'm pretty good at it. But I have a hard time proofreading the Commonweal newsletter. I get lost in the emotion of being part of so much truly wonderful work. From David Steinhart's 23 million dollars of funding for mental health treatment for juvenile offenders in California to Rachel Naomi Remen's addition of Israel and Slovenia to the countries where medical schools are offering The Healer's Art curriculum, Commonweal serves. Commonweal heals. Commonweal (if you will forgive my 58 year old adoption of a more hip vernacular) rocks.
As you will read in these pages, the last six months at Commonweal have also included the tremendous victory of the signing into law of the nation's first state biomonitoring program, the building of the yurt in the Garden, the decision of major nail polish manufacturers to end the use of the phthalate DBP, the addition of fenceline stories and European and women's environmental health to the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE), and the continuing grace of the Cancer Help Program, the Ocean Policy Project and the quiet administrative, site and financial management that hold it all together. Even on the most stressful days, Commonweal is a place of serious hope. I am very excited about The New School at Commonweal—which you'll read about in Michael's letter—because this new program will give more people the chance to experience the grace and joy and world-changing work that I find at Commonweal.
I continue to spend most of my time engaged in the environmental health program work of Commonweal. For close to 70 years, the United States and the rest of the world have allowed chemicals to be put into the products we use every day without any government oversight to assure that the ingredients in those products are safe. The emerging science of environmental health has taught us that chemicals work like pharmaceuticals—causing changes in body functions at very small doses or exposures, combining with other chemicals or pre-existing disease to cause harms that one single chemical or pharmaceutical would not cause on its own, hurting one person with special sensitivities without harming another who is less sensitive. But we have not yet created regulations that would safeguard chemicals like drugs. The U.S. government does not have pharmaceutical-like rules for chemicals that would require chemical manufacturers to look for side effects or interactions or sensitivities or determine if their product crosses the placenta. Chemical manufacturers can say that their products are safe and mean whatever they want the word to mean.
The new governance structure in the European Union has created the opportunity for new thinking and new protections for the people of that continent. The EU has begun to address the problem of unregulated chemicals in toys for young children, medical devices, computers and other electronic devices, personal care products and more generally in commerce. The winds of change in the EU have created the opportunity for more progress in the United States. The success of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is the result of the EU-generated opportunity. In the last six months, Commonweal has participated in the creation of a California dialogue on how we could transform chemical policy in our state. Seven other states—Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Michigan, Minnesota and Washington—are also working on chemical policy reform. Progressive corporations including Kaiser Permanente, Catholic Healthcare West, Interface Carpets, Dell, the clothing chain H & M, and Nike are similarly trying to figure out how to move the markets and government so they can get the information they need to make products that are safer for workers, patients and consumers, and the environment we all share. In time, market change and improvements in state policies should make it easier to win largescale federal improvements in the way we manage chemicals.
I am very excited about the opportunity I think we will have in the next few years to make social change that will lessen the suffering of families coping with chronic disease by decreasing the harm being caused by toxic chemicals. Diabetes, heart disease, asthma, breast and prostate cancer, Parkinson's disease, autism, learning disabilities and infertility are all now linked to exposures to toxic chemicals. Reducing these exposures, through personal action and government protections, will not make these diseases disappear but they will decrease an important component of these chronic health problems.
At Commonweal, we have tried to help protect the health of our staff and their families by providing comprehensive health care insurance. We aren't a big institution with lots of room for dromotions to higher-paid positions, we don't offer high salaries or stock options. So giving Commonweal staff members the financial and emotional security of employer-paid dental, vision and medical insurance has been and continues to be one of the central ways that we show the people who work at Commonweal that we are grateful for what they do every day.
Last year, we had to cut benefits for the first time in our history. Our insurance carriers proposed an increase of almost 80% to keep the coverage we had been providing. In response, Commonweal chose to go to a plan with higher deductibles and larger co-payments for prescription drugs to be able to keep everyone insured. This decision, of course, ended up hurting the Commonweal staff members with the most serious health problems. That still doesn't seem right.
Last week, we were informed that the rates for our less generous plan will go up almost 20% next year. I'm outraged. Like any small business manager, paying more for benefits means I have less money to do the programs that make Commonweal matter in the world. But I don't want to cut benefits any more than we already have.
I know how lucky I am to be able to even think about Commonweal continuing to pay for comprehensive medical insurance. And I know my luck is based on the wonderful donations that so many people have made to Commonweal over so many years. Your gifts are the essential glue that holds our community together. So let me close by thanking you for your past support and asking you to give to Commonweal again this year. We've enclosed an envelope to make sending us your donation a little bit easier. I promise to use your year-end donation so Commonweal can keep making change in the world and change in people's hearts on ocean policy, juvenile justice, environmental health, the art of healing, biomonitoring, safe cosmetics, and the Cancer Help Program. I also promise to do what I can to help reform health care financing so our medical insurance bills don't double every four or five years. According to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research more than 6 million Californians have no medical coverage. The whole system just needs to be turned around.
Meanwhile, 2007 is almost here. I wish you all and the world we share peace and joy and love.
With my best wishes,
Charlotte Brody
Executive Director
Collaborative on Health and Environment on Steep Ascending Growth Curve
by Michael Lerner
Most of you know that the Collaborative is a five-yearold national and international partnership designed to raise the level of public and professional discourse about the impact of the environment on human health. CHE offers Partners high quality monthly Partnership Calls, membership in over a dozen Working Groups, and an ethic of "science and civility" governing Partner dialogues and interactions. A central goal of CHE is to help mainstream disease-focused organizations recognize the importance of the emerging science linking their diseases of concern to environmental factors.
CHE has really moved three major sectors in the health community toward recognition of the key role of environmental factors in the diseases that concern them: learning and developmental disabilities, fertility and pregnancy compromise, and, to a lesser degree, breast cancer. We are poised to move Parkinson's disease in the same direction.
The CHE Partnership has grown to 2300 Partners in 47 States and 37 Countries. CHE held a highly successful National Conference this year on October 13 at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine with a special focus on cancer and heart disease. CHE Chair Phillip R. Lee, M.D., gave the keynote address.
The Learning and Developmental Disabilities Initiative (LDDI) is, along with CHE Fertility, CHE's most successful Working Group. LDDI, with now almost 250 organizational and individual members including most of the major national organizations addressing learning and developmental disabilities, sponsors conferences and workshops across the country on a regular basis, offers a variety of resources translating the current science on neurotoxicants for lay audiences—from parents to policymakers—and maintains a database of state and national legislative initiatives in which LDDI Partners can engage.
One especially notable offshoot of LDDI is the Autism Strategy Group, founded after a Commonweal Conference on Autism last year, which brought together the leadership of a number of the key autism research and advocacy organizations. This year the Second Commonweal Conference on Autism was held in conjunction with a Continuing Medical Education Program at University of California Davis on November 2-5. The focus of the CME Course and Commonweal Conference is to forward the "new paradigm of autism." This new paradigm proposes that environmental factors play a significant role in the disease and that autism is sometimes treatable with nutritional and other biomedical interventions.
On women's environmental health, CHE has succeeded in bringing the role of environmental contaminants into the mainstream of research and patient advocacy in the field of infertility and pregnancy compromise. The success of the Fertility/Early Pregnancy Compromise Working Group (CHE-Fertility) conference in February 2005 has led to the creation of a group consensus statement on contaminants and fertility and a lay paper on the subject entitled, "Challenged Conceptions: Environmental Chemicals and Fertility." A major national summit in January 2007 is being planned and co-sponsored by CHE and the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine (UCSF).
CHE has also succeeded in bringing the role of environmental contaminants significantly further into the mainstream of breast cancer research. This is also a major sectoral accomplishment. This year we formed a new Breast Cancer Working Group, which recently developed a consensus statement on breast cancer and the environment. Many key cancer groups and individuals have signed on to the statement, which has begun to have a significant impact on the field, contributing to very significant developments in the cancer prevention interests of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, the largest breast-cancer advocacy organization in the United States. We describe Susan Braun's new Fund for Women's Health at Commonweal, which will focus on women's cancers and the environment, in a separate section.
The major sectoral advances in infertility and breast cancer helped prompt CHE to focus a new Women's Environmental Health Working Group addressing a broad range of the health issues that women face that are linked to environmental contaminants. An initial meeting of CHE Partners in New York in December 2005 led to a larger conference at New York University in June on women's environmental health. The conference was filled to capacity with healthaffected constituencies, health professionals, reproductive health advocates and community based organizations. Members of the working group are planning its next steps, which include a research project on the role of endocrine disrupting chemicals in women's environmental health and a web site that will serve as a comprehensive source for information on women's environmental health.
CHE is poised to make the same kind of sectoral leap in Parkinson's disease that it made this year in infertility and breast cancer. The CHE-Parkinson's Disease Working Group is convening a conference in April with Parkinson's Action Network and the Parkinson's Institute to develop a science consensus statement on Parkinson's disease and the environment.
CHE has also formed a strategic partnership with HEAL, the European Public Health Association's Environmental Network, an international non-governmental organization focused on greater protection of the environment as a means to improving the health and well being of European citizens. We are co-sponsoring a conference with HEAL and ARTAC (Association for Research and Treatments Against Cancer) in Paris on November 9 at UNESCO where representatives from CHE will be making presentations.
CHE now also has Regional Working Groups in Washington State, Oregon, Alaska, New York/New Jersey/ Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and a nascent group in Vermont.
Perhaps most important of all, the sectoral work of moving whole patient/health professional communities forward toward a framing of environmental health has helped us develop our own understanding of the conception of environmental health that we are developing with others.
To date, we have used two deeply complementary frames for describing environmental health. One frame, developed by Pete Myers, has been to describe the revolution in environmental health sciences. The environmental health revolution, as Pete Myers describes it, "is about chemicals, nutrients and other factors, including experience, that alter gene expression. Many factors alter gene expression. Some factors are chemicals. (Some of those chemicals are endocrine disruptors, but some are not.) Some factors are experience. Some factors are nutrition. Some factors are socioeconomic variables that work through gene expression pathways. These changes in gene expression have immediate effects, by altering development. And they have later effects, by changing the responsiveness of the system to subsequent signals, for example, by increasing (or decreasing) the density of hormone receptors and thereby by increasing (or decreasing) sensitivity to hormone signaling (and hormone interference)."
The second frame has been developed by Ted Schettler, who has made the important observation that there are three levels of health: personal health, public health, and ecological health. Ted's emphasis, like Pete's, is on the complexity of the interaction between environmental contaminants, gene expression, nutrition, stress, and many other factors. Ted describes many of the diseases of our time as "ecological diseases" that do not result from a single toxicant, or set of toxicants, causing a single disease through a single causal pathway. Rather, many different environmental stressors interact with the organism and all the other sources of stress and nurturance in the environment in ways that result in different diseases and disorders for different people.
Jackie Hunt Christensen receiving an award at the Parkinson's Disease Action Network's 13th Annual Morris K. Udall Awards Dinner
What I have described here only scratches the surface of what is happening in the Collaborative on Health and the Environment. In the broader environmental health movement, CHE brings the patient and health professional groups to the table to raise the level of public and professional dialogue regarding the impact of the environment on human health. In contrast to the typical organizing techniques of grass-roots based, marketfocused campaigns, which are the backbone of environmental health advocacy, CHE brings a much softer and more open approach to organizing in the patient and health professional communities, where advocacy is often a dirty word and where constituencies range across the entire political spectrum.
By focusing on our motto, "science and civility," CHE brings the revolution in environmental health sciences to health-focused constituencies and lets each CHE Partner reach his or her own conclusions about the significance of the emerging science. On the science, we try to veer neither to the right nor to the left—neither to industry nor to advocacy spin—but to come right down the middle on the science, because sound science in environmental health ultimately plays in our favor; we do not need to spin or overstate the science.
We do not seek to build a permanent institution but seek to refine a set of coordinated activities that contributes to the field. We will know that our work is done when we have moved a sufficient number of key health sectors so that a sea change takes place and the role of environmental contributors to public and ecological health is broadly embraced and understood. Five years into the development of CHE, my estimate is that we may be halfway home.
CHE is an amazing human experience for those of us deeply engaged in it. CHE is, for me, the most powerful personal experience since we launched the Cancer Help Program, Health Care Without Harm, and the Health and Environmental Funders Network. CHE represents that interface of personal and planetary health and healing that Commonweal was founded to serve 32 years ago. It is a privilege to do this work, and we are deeply grateful to all who contribute their time, resources and counsel to make it possible.
News from the Commonweal Garden
by Rachel Berry
Photo by Rachel Berry
Commonweal Garden had a tremendous summer season. Among the many highlights, Commonweal Garden hosted over 600 students and visitors to participate in the garden and learn about sustainability and regenerative design, a new yurt classroom was built, garden beds were expanded to grow registered organic produce for the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, and a new series of special youth programs were created so both young children and teens could explore their relationship to nature and the food they eat. The garden is flourishing with the help of many hands.
In late October, Penny and James Livington-Stark traveled to Europe with a delegation from Marin Organic to tour Prince Charles' country home and garden, Highgrove, and participate in Slow Food's Terra Madre in Italy, where Penny was asked to present her work in permaculture. More details on the Commonweal Garden will be included in the next issue of our newsletter.
To learn more about the Regenerative Design Institute at Commonweal Garden, and for a listing of upcoming events and courses, visit www.regenerativedesign.org or call 415-868-9681.
News about the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness
Photo courtesy of Scott Hess
by Rachel Naomi Remen, Director
Dear friends and colleagues,
One of the most delightful new developments this Fall season is that the work of ISHI is beginning to spread around the world—to countries as diverse as Slovenia and Israel—and we are deeply moved by this growing sense of a genuine community of medicine that transcends national boundaries. This past July, despite urgent hostilities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two professors from Ben Gurion University School of Medicine joined us at our Healer's Art Faculty Development training here at Commonweal. In speaking of a new awareness of the lineage of medicine, discovered during the training, one of the Israeli professors wrote:
"It is odd that I had never paid attention to the lineage of medicine before; that I never noticed that the healers of the past were there, had always been there, stretching out farther than the eye can see, farther than the mind can conceive. But they were there all the time; patient, good, radiant, caring, touching, reaching out to lend a hand, to cushion a fall, to heal a wound, to still a pain; tender, accepting, present. I thought the past was behind me and when I turned to look there was always nothing—just the empty space after a breeze has passed, the silence at the end of the sound of the chime. But they are within me and I had not thought to look there. Now when I speak I hear more voices than I can count, reverberating with each thought, each word, each feeling, each moment. I shall never need to be alone again."
In early Spring at the University of Ljubljana School of Medicine in Slovenia, fifty-six students participated in the Healer's Art curriculum for the first time and received it with great enthusiasm. Like students everywhere, they wrote a personal mission statement detailing their dream of service to their patients. When these were translated from Slovenian, we were amazed to find that these statements could have easily been written by any American medical student or physician.
Their course director, Professor Urska Lunder, MD, shares the enthusiasm of her students and recently published a description of the course in the Journal of Slovene Chamber of Physicians after which she was invited to discuss the course on a talk radio show. She wrote to share the following with us.
"The president of our country, Dr. Drnovsek, is a very spiritual man and a survivor of kidney cancer. After this experience he started a movement for social justice to raise public awareness about social, health, justice, economic and environmental problems beyond politics. This has become a civil movement and Slovene people use it to propose and perform all kinds of activities under his protection and encouragement.
Our President has a web page for this movement, which is very much a mirror of the actual problems in Slovenia, and the practical activities people undertake to solve them. After my discussion of the Healer's Art course on the radio he wrote to me to invite me to report to him on the new course!! My report about your course and about our experience in it is now on his web page. People read it and there are many interesting responses and comments sent to me by the public and the profession. It is in Slovene unfortunately, but here it is: http://www.gibanje.org/?id=284&action=arhiv)
Isn't this great???
Much love from Slovenia, Urska"
Not only has the Healer's Art disseminated internationally for the first time this year, but it is now reaching across disciplinary boundaries into the world of pharmacy. Dr. Ellie Vogt, visiting scholar in the UCSF School of Pharmacy, took the Healer's Art training in 2005. In 2006 she offered the Healer's Art course to the incoming first year class of pharmacy students at UCSF with a highly positive outcome, and will continue to offer it in 2007. Dr. Vogt presented her experience and the evaluations of the UCSF pharmacy students at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) this Spring and was met with a highly enthusiastic response from the deans of schools of pharmacy nationwide. Pharmacy schools around the country are interested in implementing the course, much in the way that medical schools have implemented it since the year 2000.
In the Spring newsletter I described with enthusiasm our Healer's Art research efforts. Dr. Michael Rabow, Director of the Center for the Study of the Healer's Art, presented the Healer's Art National Outcome Study at the annual meetings of the Society for General Internal Medicine (SGIM) and the Society for Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) this Spring and is encouraging and coordinating the efforts of Course Directors nationally to make presentations of their experience with the course to professional groups. Presentations on the course and its outcome have been made to medical educators at twelve medical schools around the country (Dartmouth, Louisiana University, SUNY, Tufts, UC Irvine, and the Universities of Kentucky, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Texas—2 schools, and Wright State) and a PowerPoint mini-presentation on the experience of the national Healer's Art course has been developed and disseminated to Course Directors nationwide.
The essential work of ISHI is to encourage the emergence of a national community of physicians, medical students and healthcare professionals, in which all can find an opportunity to question, grow and practice medicine as art, heal from the wounds of medical training and current professional experiences, and find genuine and open colleagueship. I am sometimes amazed at the exponential growth of the work, since what ISHI has accomplished thus far has been on a shoestring budget with a small, passionately dedicated and hardworking staff. We welcome our new Associate Director of the Healer's Art program, Dianne Duchesne, RN, who has this to say about being a part of ISHI and Commonweal:
"It means so much for me to be part of this work. A nursing career that spans over 30 years has taught me the vital importance of balancing compassion and humanism with science in the institutions of mainstream medicine and reinvigorating the heart and soul of medical education. I am proud to be part of an organization that fosters wellness in medicine and in every phase of life, and is making the courageous effort to promote wellness on this planet. I thank you all for inviting me here and holding me within the Commonweal experience."
What continues to be most rewarding for all of us at ISHI is that the evaluations of our programs suggest that we have been able to reach deeply into the lives of a great many medical students, physicians and healthcare professionals and enable others to live closer to their own dream of compassionate service. In doing so we have fulfilled our dream of service far beyond our imaginings.
Chemical Contamination in Fenceline Communities
Photo: Ohio Citizen Action
Hundreds of thousands of Americans live in communities immediately adjacent to heavily polluting industries or military bases. Residents in these communities, who tend to be disproportionately low-income and people of color, suffer elevated disease rates as a result of exposure to pollutions from these facilities.
In a follow-up to its environmental justice work in Diamond, Louisiana, Commonweal recently initiated a series of reports from the frontlines of chemical exposure and will produce a dozen reports from fenceline communities around the nation. These stories are written and reported by Steve Lerner, Commonweal's Research Director. The first of these stories, which will eventually be collected into book form, is published on the CHE website (Collaborative on Health and the Environment) and can be viewed at: www.healthandenvironment.org.
The first story details what life is like in Addyston, Ohio, a blue-collar, largely white, company town located across the street from the Lanxess Plastics plant on the banks of the Ohio River just outside Cincinnati on the Kentucky border. For decades, residents of Addyston have lived next to this plant (previously owned by Monsanto and Bayer) and breathed in the foul odors and pollutants that wafted across the fenceline. Recently, organizers from Ohio Citizen Action began to examine the number of accidental releases of highly toxic chemicals from the plant and question the wisdom of the location of an elementary school directly across the street from the plant's gates.
After three highly publicized accidental releases of toxic chemicals from the plant garnered heavy media attention, local citizens organized a grassroots group to protest pollution coming from the plant that they thought was injuring their health. With help from Ohio Citizen Action organizers, local residents raised awareness of the pollution problem in town and eventually state health officials conducted a survey that found elevated cancer rates in the community. The school was subsequently closed, the plant manager was fired, and a new management team was brought in with millions of dollars to invest in upgrading pollution control equipment.
The second story in this series has not yet gone to press but will be published soon. It describes a community in Daly City, California, in South San Francisco where public housing was built on land that was covered with contaminated soil from an old PG&E gas manufacturing plant. While extensive remedial efforts have been made to dig up the toxic soils and cart them off to a hazardous waste site, residents and activists point out that the contaminated soils were never removed from beneath their homes and that residents continue to experience a high level of disease that they argue is caused by exposure to chemical contamination. For decades their kids played in the soils adjacent to the PG&E facility and families ate out of vegetable gardens that have since been banned because of contamination concerns. Residents are demanding that they be compensated for the damage done to their lives and their health and that they be moved into homes of their own.
Future reports will also focus on communities adjacent to U.S. military bases where toxic wastes were poured into the ground and subsequently migrated across the fenceline into residential areas where they caused disease and death.
Juvenile Justice Program Director David Steinhart is Named to Two California Advisory Groups
In July, Juvenile Justice Program Director David Steinhart was appointed by the Senate Rules committee to California's new state Juvenile Justice Commission. The Commission, reconstituted in 2005, is charged by law with "comprehensive oversight, planning and coordination" of efforts to improve California state and local juvenile justice systems. The Commission replaces an older state advisory group that was widely considered to be out of touch with pressing issues and current reform needs. Besides Steinhart, ten other members are appointed by the Governor, the Assembly and the state Judicial Council. Steinhart's appointment lasts until July 2008.
Last July, the Legislature added $23 million to the California state budget for services for juvenile offenders with mental health treatment needs. In September, David Steinhart was named to the Executive Steering Committee advising the state Corrections Standards Authority (CSA) on eligibility and selection criteria for grant programs serving these offenders. In December, Steinhart will join other Steering Committee members in reviewing county applications and making grant recommendations to the CSA Board. Mental health services for juvenile offenders have been woefully lacking in California. Many of these young people are locked for long periods in juvenile facilities where, without adequate care, their mental health status deteriorates. The new funds, combined with Proposition 63 (Mental Health Services Act) dollars, will improve diagnostic capability and broaden access to treatment for these children in many areas of the state.
As approved by the Governor, the new California state budget contains several other positive results. Throughout 2006, we joined children's advocates across the state in calling for a renewal of funds for the Schiff-Cardenas Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act (JJCPA). Under this Act (which Commonweal helped to bring about in 2000) more than a half-billion dollars over six years has gone into county-level youth crime prevention programs, including dropout prevention and after school programs, gang outreach partnerships, post-confinement aftercare plans and specialized programs for girls. In this year's budget JJCPA funds were increased to $119 million statewide. In another development, our efforts to expand services for young people released from secure confinement were rewarded with approval of a new statewide revenue stream. The new "Juvenile Justice Re-Entry Challenge Grant Program" will provide $10 million per year over three years to counties for local re-entry services for children released from state and local secure facilities. The focus of these grants will be on helping paroled youth meet re-entry challenges like finding a place to live, finding a job, enrolling in school and staying crime free.
The Juvenile Justice Program continues its affiliation with the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In November, the Foundation will publish a 100 page "Practice Guide" to Juvenile Detention Risk Assessment, written by Program Director David Steinhart. The guide teaches local judges, probation personnel and other juvenile justice system stakeholders how to design and apply risk assessment instruments used to make the critical post-arrest decision on whether the child should be locked up or released.
In June, the Juvenile Justice Program received a $65,000 grant from the Haigh- Scatena Foundation to support its work on California juvenile justice reform. Other foundations presently funding the Program include the California Wellness Foundation, the Wallace A. Gerbode Foundation, the JEHT Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We are deeply grateful to these foundations for their continuing interest and support.
NEWS ABOUT THE
Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center
by Sharyle Patton, Director and Davis Baltz, Senior Program Associate
On September 29, 2006, California became the first state to pass a law mandating a state-based biomonitoring program, a program that will test Californians for the presence of environmental chemicals and help us understand the complex linkages between toxic chemicals and diseases like asthma, thyroid and prostate cancers, and others that Californians are increasingly experiencing. Biomonitoring is the measurement of blood, urine, hair, bone, and other human biospecimens for evidence of environmental (synthetic) chemical exposure.
Commonweal was one of the first non-profit groups to explore biomonitoring as a source of scientific information documenting human exposure to environmental chemicals. In 2000-2001, Commonweal worked with the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and the Environmental Working Group to test the blood and urine of nine individuals for the presence of over 200 toxic chemicals. We wanted to learn about the level of chemicals in our bodies, but more importantly, we wanted to start a process to democratize biomonitoring. By implementing this pilot project, we wanted to learn more about how individuals reacted to the process and to the communication of their personal biomonitoring data. We wanted to know if such information might help change attitudes as well as regulations about the use of toxic chemicals. We wanted to learn how future studies could be designed to inform the general public and study participants in ways that were meaningful, so that individuals participating in such studies could use her or his individual data to make precautionary choices about products they used or the kinds of food they ate, and become interested as well in becoming politically active in reducing environmental exposures for their communities. Essentially, we wanted to make biomonitoring a tool that would help us take better care of each other, our families, and ourselves.
Commonweal worked closely for four years with the Breast Cancer Fund in cosponsoring legislation that would initiate biomonitoring in California. This year, Senate Bill 1379, co-authored by Senator Perata and Senator Ortiz, was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. We are pleased that years of hard work have produced a program we can be proud of and thank the hundreds of communitybased groups and individuals across the state who supported biomonitoring in California. We are especially grateful to those individuals who participated in Commonweal's Taking It All In biomonitoring project, which raised the level of public awareness about the need for a state-based biomonitoring program.
The California program will biomonitor a random selection of 2000 Californians every second year, providing a statistically significant baseline concerning the chemical exposure for the average Californian. A second component of the program provides for the testing of communities of particular concern, communities related by geographical area, occupation, product use, or health outcome, that might be experiencing unusual and possibly unsafe exposures. A third key element of the program is the communication of individual data to those individuals who request this information, and this element was key to our support of the bill, given our commitment to an individual's right to know what chemicals his or her body might carry. Chemicals will be selected for biomonitoring based on solid scientific concerns, and the program will not be restricted to exploring exposures to only those chemicals that are currently regulated or those listed in federal monitoring programs. Guiding the program will be a scientific advisory board to be appointed by the Governor and the state legislature.
We believe that biomonitoring will help Californians become healthier, and that the California biomonitoring program will lead the way for other states and communities interested in taking better care of future generations. More information about biomonitoring can be found on these websites: www.ewg.org/bodyburden and www.commonweal.org.
COMMONWEAL CANCER HELP PROGRAM
Seven Days Of Healing
by Michael Lerner
We are in our 132 nd Cancer Help Program as I write. Eight women this time, one a returning alumna. Tonight we do the session on choices in healing, conventional and complementary therapies. Tomorrow night we explore pain and suffering and death and dying. Naturally, I cannot say anything about the participants themselves. But I can say what I said to them Monday afternoon as I described what the week would be like:
Photo by Dr. Bob Rufsvold
"After today, the week falls into a regular pattern. You get up, do yoga, meditation and deep relaxation, and then have breakfast. The morning support group session with Lenore Lefer follows, then lunch. In the afternoon you will have massage, sandtray, individual sessions with Lenore or me, or time in the library or outside or whatever you choose. The second yoga session is at 5 o'clock.
"After dinner, we have the evening sessions—what brings you here on Monday, choices in healing on Tuesday, the session on death and dying on Wednesday. Thursday you have a healing circle with Waz Thomas, and Friday Waz will do the evening on healing words. We used to call it poetry evening but people were too scared of writing poetry. Saturday we gather for the last evening to talk about what we are taking home.
"You come here armored against all the pain and difficulty you have been carrying—not just the cancer and treatments. Often the psychological pain from other areas of people's lives is even greater. And now, you don't have to cook, or clean up, or go to work. There is no newspaper, no radio or television, no sound of traffic. In this deeply peaceful place, it is as though you were a sponge that had sopped up a lot of grit and dirty water that was being dipped in warm clean water, then squeezed out, dipped again and squeezed out.
"And as you relax more and more deeply, many experiences that you have carried frozen in your body and mind begin to bubble up to the surface, and we give you many different ways to express those experiences. And as you express them, they begin to shift and change. As you are willing to express whatever comes up, then whatever lies under that becomes more available to you. And so this flow develops, this deeper capacity to access what has been unconscious, which is closely related to the creative flow. And that is very healing.
"You may find that some of the other participants are not people you would be drawn to in social settings. You know, we often judge people by how they look, what they do, how educated they are, and so forth. But here all of those social judgments fall away, and we have the possibility of seeing each other from the heart. Even so, someone might be challenging for you. If someone is challenging, please recognize that whatever that person is doing, she is doing the best she knows how to do at this moment. Just see if you can open up enough spaciousness to accept her. For the truth is that the healing work we do here works best if the whole group works deeply together. Then each of us can go deeper than any of us could go if we were doing this alone."
So, that is a taste of what I say to participants as we start a Cancer Help Program. I tell them that we have only one goal, which is to make this the best possible week for their healing that we can offer. We can prepare the space, I say, but the work is up to them. And that means not only working on yourself but working together so the group can accomplish its work.
And so the week begins, another of the extraordinary cycle of retreats that have hallowed Commonweal for 21 years. Waz Thomas presides over the week, as coordinator and yoga teacher, with his incredible grace and gentleness. Jenepher Stowell's deep quiet wisdom and the beauty of her Retreat Center hold us all. Our psychotherapists, Lenore Lefer and Stuart Horance, are gifted beyond words. Jnani Chapman has been described as a "Michelangelo of massage" by some of her grateful clients. Jnani coordinates a wonderful team of massage therapists including Monica Kaufer and Sabriga Turgon. Claire Heart and Rebecca Katz and their assistants are magicians in the kitchen. Mimi Mindel helps connect participants with research information and other valuable resources. Irene Gallwey comes up from Carmel to lead the sandtray sessions. For all of us on staff these retreat weeks are great blessings of our lives.
EARTH SPIRIT
Contemporary & Traditional Expressions of American Indian Art at the Commonweal Gallery in Bolinas, California
Commonweal is honored to present this exhibit in collaboration with The Marin Museum of the American Indian. The Earth Spirit exhibit honors the origins and traditions of American Indian art through contemporary expressions in a multiplicity of forms: found object sculptures, fiber and paper work constructions and photographs of American Indians from remote parts of the country. The artists are sculptor Kevin "Mooshka" Cata, sculptor Linda Ortiz and photographer Scott Ridgway. At the Artists' Reception on November 1, a remarkable slide show, compiled by Lee Swenson, displayed a vibrant representation of 150 years of American Indian art from around the country.
The Earth Spirit exhibit runs from November 1, 2006 to January 19, 2007, Monday through Friday, 10 am to 4 pm at the Commonweal Gallery, located at 451 Mesa Road, Bolinas, CA.
With Gratitude
We express our deep gratitude to the following organizations that have supported Commonweal this year:
Arthur Vining Davis Foundation
Baer Foundation
Bank of America Matching Gifts
Barbara Smith Fund
Beldon Fund
Breast Cancer Fund
California Wellness Foundation
Cedar Tree Foundation
Coalition for Safe Minds
Community Foundation of Sonoma County
Compton Foundation
David and Lucile Packard Foundation
The Flow Fund
George Family Foundation
Haigh-Scatena Foundation
Health Care Without Harm
HUT Foundation
Impact Assessment, Inc.
Jenifer Altman Foundation
John Merck Fund
Marin Breast Cancer Council
Nathan Cummings Foundation
New York Community Trust
Park Foundation
Resources Legacy Fund Foundation
Szekely Family Foundation
State Coastal Conservancy
Stinson/Bolinas Community Fund
Vira I. Heinz Endowment
Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation
Wallace Genetic Foundation
Westside Village
and several foundations that prefer anonymity.
We offer special thanks and gratitude to the following Commonweal Friends for their generous contributions during the last six months:
Rita Arditti
Bradford A. Balkus
Frances C. Barilotti
Erika Bast Little
Florence & Milton Beck
Walter L. Blount, Jr.
Tracy Burgess
Jody Bush
David Chojnacki
Catherine T. Clark-Sayles, MD
John Colla-Negri
Anjanette Cureton
Victoria De Goff
Cecile Earle
Keith Echelmeyer & Susan Campbell
Marta Elders, PhD
Pauline Flynn
Marjorie Ford
Deborah J. Gerner
Kathy Gerwig
Daniel Goleman
Sadja Greenwood & Alan Margolis
Jeanne Halpern
Jan A. Hamanishi
Serena Hatch
Steve L. Heilig
Don Heydendahl
Mary Hirzel
George & Ann Hogle
Karlyn Horton
Lorette & Stan Janczura
Ian Johnson
Dennis Johnson
Helen Kilzer
Lynda Koolish
Marty Krasney
Louisa Kreisberg
Lenore & Mel Lefer
Bokara Legendre
Mary Lenox
Iyana Christine Leveque
Sally Little Berger
Madeline Littlefield
Richard Loftus, MD
Eleanor Lyman
Constance Mahoney
Stephanie Mann
William Marcus
Leslie Marsh
Pamela Mayer
Susan B. McIntosh
Martha A. Mejia
Josie Merck
Kiyomi Mizukami
Mayumi Mizukami
Jana & Glenn Peterson
Edith Piltch
Lawrence Price
Jeanne Rizzo
Ruth Rosen
Debra and Bill Rostenberg
Heather Schermerhorn
Beth & Rob Setrakian
Peter and Carol Shaughnessy
Jay Simoneaux
Donald Smith & Jane Mickelson
Laura Steeg
Deb Steele
Carolyn Svenson
David Theis
Mary Evelyn Tucker & John Grim
Lucy Waletzky
Shirley Ward Deininger
Marjan Wazeka
Judy White & Barry Michels
Lawrence Wilkinson
Joan Wood
Carol Wuebker
and several anonymous donors.
