Face to Face, Heart to Heart: Two Friends Share Learnings from More Than 300 Week-Long Cancer Retreats

Janie Brown RN, MSN, MA was raised in Scotland and educated with a masters in psychology at St. Andrews University, and then a masters in nursing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She worked for many years as an oncology nurse and clinical nurse specialist at BC Cancer in Vancouver. In 1995, inspired by the Cancer Help Program at Commonweal, she founded the Callanish Society, a grassroots non-profit organization for people living with, and dying from, cancer, based in Vancouver. She co-produced a documentary film: I’m Still Here: Young Adults Living Life with Recurrent Cancer. Janie’s book Radical Acts of Love: Twenty Conversations to Inspire Hope at the End of Life (Canongate, UK 2020) describes her work of 30 years working with families living with cancer.

Michael is the president emeritus and co-founder of Commonweal. His principal work today at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and Commonweal New School. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1984 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press).