Janie Brown and Michael Lerner
Radical Acts of Love: Finding Hope in the Face of COVID-19
~Co-presented by The New School at Commonweal, the Commonweal Resilience Project, Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies, and Healing Circles~
Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a virtual conversation with Janie Brown, nurse, psychologist, and founder of the Callanish Society—a grassroots non-profit organization in Vancouver for people living with, and dying from, cancer.
Janie Brown
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 presents nationally and internationally and writes a widely read blog. In 2016, Janie received a Lloyd Symington Foundation grant to write her book Radical Acts of Love: How We Find Hope at the End of Life which was published in March 2020 by Canongate in the UK, and Doubleday, Canada. About the book, Stephen Fry writes: “Janie Brown demonstrates the power of a book to transform, in fact to turn things upside down. She turns death into life, despair into hope, sorrow into joy and pain into love with these twenty astonishing encounters with the dying. We all know somewhere in the back of our minds that a deeper understanding and acceptance of death is supposed to release us into an even fiercer embrace of life — this wonderful book made me for the first time truly feel and believe it. Unforgettably wise, kind and wonderful.”