The Charlotte Maxwell Complementary Clinic is a community of dedicated women volunteers who have diverse skills and experiences. We are healthcare practitioners and healthcare advocates; we are community organizers; we are lesbians and straight women. We are unified in our goal of offering complementary alternative medicine treatments to women with cancer who are underserved and share the following beliefs and goals.
CMCC Guiding Principles
- Ensure accessibility to and promote outreach and education about complementary forms of care for women with cancer.
- Provide ongoing and consistent emotional, spiritual, and political support to women with cancer.
- Work in ways that expand the sense of personal and collective power among women with cancer through education, personal connection, and social and political alliance.
- Continually increase our understanding of cancer and the societal causes of cancer, of the different experience of women with cancer, and of the different and newly emerging forms of healing and treatment through education, communication, and training.
- Recognize, accept, and respect the very individual and subjectively different experiences of each woman with cancer as she herself relates, describes, and defines it; acknowledge the validity of her power to make choices for herself in terms of lifestyle, treatment, and healing; encourage and support her struggle to establish and maintain authorship of her own life.
- Build and sustain a community with and for women living with cancer based on an openness of heart, mind, and spirit, clear and honest communication, and a shared sense of wholeness and well-being.
- Ensure accessibility of information and services to communities of color because we recognize the destruction that racism creates in our society including a higher incidence of disease.
- Serve as a role model for organizing other health concerns, e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, environmental illness, and men’s health issues.
- Expand and increase the awareness of the western medical establishment about complementary medicine.
- Serve women who lack the economic means to have access to complementary medicine.
The information above can be found on the official website of Charlotte Maxwell Complementary Clinic. For more details about the organization and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit their website: http://www.charlottemaxwell.org