Our Mission
Together, we can build community and support Human Canaries through:
Education
Providing information and resources to increase awareness and understanding of Complex Chronic Illness, MCS, CI, CIRS, MCAS, Fibromyalgia, and Migraine.
Healthcare Access
Advocating, researching, identifying, and improving access to effective and appropriate medical and health care, including what we hope to offer through coaching and our goal of a brick and mortar healing center.
Safe Housing and Shelter
Advocating for housing solutions that accommodate the needs of individuals with chemical sensitivities. Creating a forum for sharing information about safe building materials. Continuing to work towards our goal of being able to provide a short term rental at our planned healing center.
Advocacy
Fighting for the civil rights, needs, and protections of those with MCS, CI, CIRS, and MCAS.
Creativity and the Arts
Promoting creative expression as a means of healing and raising awareness.
Creative Advocacy
Using innovative approaches to advocate for environmental and health policy changes.
Fundraising, Services, and an Online Store
Generating revenue not only through fundraising and donations but through the sale of goods and services, including remote coaching, in-person coaching and treatment at our healing center, BnB accommodations at our shelter, and an online store on our website. Achieving our goals, especially building and maintaining a brick-and-mortar healing center and shelter, will require significant funding. Our plan is to operate not only through donations but also by utilizing affiliate links and an online store to sell products and services. Planned products include recommended air purifiers and home treatment equipment such as mild hyperbaric oxygen chambers.
Benefit Concerts and Multimedia Events
Combining music, art, multimedia, education and advocacy to build community and generate revenue. Currently, the founder is working on this project with internationally renowned cellist and composer René Schiffer and hoping to have a local event scheduled soon.
Showcasing Creative Work
I, Olivia, began building this website in 2020 with funding from the Ohio Arts Council ADAP program. I planned to showcase both new work along with a retrospective. The chronology of my creative work correlates to some degree with the progression and increasing complexity of my illness—how exposure in my teens and early 20s as a ceramic artist to raw lead, heavy metals, and clay and glaze chemical dust, followed by musical instrument building and wood-shop exposure to wood finishes and sawdust made me sick and laid the groundwork for ever-escalating, compounding injuries and repeated episodes of TILT. This chronology of work also correlates to the natural the progression from multimedia artist to multimodality healer and a combination of these.
My goal was and is to showcase the work of other Creative Canaries in addition to my own. I also want to pay tribute to people like Rhonda Zwillinger whose book: The Dispossessed: Living with Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (photographs and stories, pub. 1999, b.1950 d.1919) and Canadian singer-songwriter, Kim Palmer (d.2006), whose recordings included Songs From A Porcelain Trailer. The beauty and poignancy of these artists, their lives and work, and other artists struggling with “this illness” (complex of medical conditions), continues to inspire me in a way and with a depth that text alone has difficulty reaching, and I see it as an important way to reach a larger audience. When a lot of people meet Human Canaries they have a difficult time imagining that they ever had “normal lives” and the enormity of the losses involved.
Our mission at Canary Refuge is to educate, advocate, work towards solutions and healing. The Arts are a powerful means of communication and advocacy!