April 2, 2017,
Dear everyone—all one hundred and eight of you who have donated a total of $3,506 to this campaign in the past month! THANK YOU!
Your support has been so important during this critical time for my advocacy work. This past month your help made it possible for me to pay my attorney bills (there are more coming, but it’s nice to get off on the right foot there!) as well as to continue doing what I do… healthy home visits with families, testing consumer goods (& report results), helping families directly in many other ways too, writing blog posts (answering questions that come to me each week -my blog posts had more than 39,800 unique hits in March alone!), sharing relevant articles on social media, and answering specific questions of countless families each week via social media (my Facebook reach this past month exceeded 50,000 a week some weeks!) , e-mail and phone calls. Thank you. It actually has gone a long way to making me “whole” again to dive back into what I do – after being stopped in my tracks for four months last August.
For more frequent updates, I encourage all of you to subscribe to my newsletter (if you are not already subscribed) via the “subscribe” window on any page of my website: www.TamaraRubin.com (I currently have just over 1,850 subscribers on my new list & have room for 2,000 total) and to follow my film’s page on Facebook at http://www.Facebook.com/MisleadMovie (where “the film” now has 12,753 followers, as the numbers have spiked due to all of the activity on the page in the last few months [bone broth, sippy cups and Earthpaste, oh my!!!)
Here is the link my most recent newsletter from this morning – with links to 12 recent articles about lead, lead poisoning prevention (and environmental toxicity in general) that were published in the last week or so.
http://us14.campaign-archive1.com/?u=7872f72663c7bcc4ea0f8c52b&id=17ac4a64cb
If you haven’t yet spoken to me on the phone, but would like to, please feel free to text me at 415-609-3182 (the same phone number I have had for nearly 20 years now!) and I will do my best to call you back as soon as I have a quiet minute without children underfoot.
On the more personal front, Charlie (my 8 year old) may actually start school tomorrow! His first day of school this year (2016/2017 school year!) after the school he was assigned to in September had ridiculous lead hazards (window sill lead dust levels in the special needs classroom exceeding 20,000 micrograms of lead per square foot [When the hazard level is 250 or 400 depending on which standard you look at!]!) and first the district denied the hazards existed, then (September/October) they were convinced (by me) to test, and then (November) they assured me that the hazards had been taken care of, but when I went back to check on the classroom -they hand’t even been touched! (It’s a much more dramatic story that this actually – I will have to write it up as a blog post!) And this is AFTER all the alleged “bad apples” were purged from the school district over the Portland Public School District lead-in-water scandal that finally broke last year! #Sigh. Anyhoo, Charlie’s new school was extensively remodeled in 1985 (even though it was originally constructed in 1930), and we actually think it is one of the lead-safest schools in the Portland Public School district that we have seen so far!
this is AFTER all the alleged “bad apples” were purged from the school district over the Portland Public School District lead-in-water scandal that finally broke last year! #Sigh. Anyhoo, Charlie’s new school was extensively remodeled in 1985 (even though it was originally constructed in 1930), and we actually think it is one of the lead-safest schools in the Portland Public School district that we have seen so far!Thank you again for your support of my work helping others,
I am unmeasurably grateful for your help during what continues to be an incredibly difficult time for my family.
Sincerely,
Tamara Elise Rubin
Unexpected Lead Expert
Mother of Four Sons
P.S. One of the fun new advocacy things I am doing with my friend Carissa (http://www.CreativeGreenLiving.com) is #GuerillaXRFTesting of consumer goods on the shelves in retails stores. We have made 8 YouTube videos of testing we did last month at Target (everything we could film before the manager threw us out because you are “not allowed to film in a store without permission”! :-), and as soon as this #GoFundMe reaches $5,000, we’re going to go out and do another store too (chosen by a survey of members of the public Facebook group The Lead (Pb) Group)! Here’s the link to the Target videos we made – check them out; they’re actually a lot of fun! https://tamararubin.com/category/videos/. [If you are in “the industry” at all and have any contacts that might be interested in helping us polish, produce, market and distribute these videos (featuring me and Carissa as the dynamic-duo of non-toxic mama warriors, with an XRF in hand! 😉 , please let me know. We would love to get sponsorship/ producer interest so we could do a ton more of these.]
P.P.S. I am also urgently in search of an additional attorney for my legal team – someone licensed to practice in Oregon with a focus on nonprofit law. If you have any suggestions or referrals, please do let me know. Thank you!
P.P.P.S. If you shop on Amazon at all, here’s a link with another way you can help (and invite your friends to help too – at no cost to them!). https://tamararubin.com/2017/04/amazon_april/
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