Lead Safe Mama outreach booth (with FREE consumer goods testing for attendees!) this weekend!

Tuesday – July 26, 2022

Lead Safe Mama, LLC is [after a too-long absence!] once again this year proud to be a sponsor and partner of the 18th annual Northwest World Reggae Festival [in a new location this year — in Beavercreek, Oregon]! We hope to see some of you there on Friday and Saturday! Here’s the link to buy tickets and to get all of the details about the festival!

As we have in many years past (back as far as 2009!), we will have a Lead-poisoning prevention outreach booth with fun activities for children and families at this year’s Northwest World Reggae Festival! (#NWWRF for short!) I will be there with THREE of my sons – now ages: 20, 17, and 14! – and my dear “imaginary” HUSBAND (he’s only ever been able to previously attend the festival with me once!] this year, manning the booth — and we would love some additional volunteers (let me know if you are interested in volunteering! Text is best: 415-609-3182 & we’ll see if we can get you a free day-pass to the event in exchange for your time helping out!)

What you can find at the Lead Safe Mama booth this year:

With the anticipated heat coming this weekend… we bought some cool misters to spray water on any visitors to our booth! [We’re working on making sure we have a water hookup for the (Lead-free!) hoses we got for this — so hopefully, this works out!]
The boys will be giving juggling lessons to anyone who is interested!
Pending available trees near our booth, the kids will also be setting up a slack line for folks to use.
We will have FREE face-painting!
We will do FREE consumer goods testing [using state-of-the-art XRF analysis]!
We will have a fun game (this is a game we have at MOST events we do!)…here’s how the game works: YOU ask us any question about Lead — the use of Lead, and Lead-exposure and poisoning throughout history, and in the U.S. today; the economics, politics, and impacts of Lead-poisoning — and it’s effective prevention; Lead in consumer goods; Lead-safe work practices in renovation — anything eat all — and in thanks for taking the time to ask a question, you get a raffle ticket to enter for a chance to win fabulous (Lead-free!) prizes donated by Lead Safe Mama sponsors and other generous donors! All you have to do to enter for a chance to win is … ASK A QUESTION! This year’s FABULOUS prizes include a Naturepedic Organic Crib Mattress (donated by Naturepedic!) and Kleynimals stainless steel toy keys for babies, (donated by Kleynimals!) Every game participant (or their child, if they bring one) additionally is invited spin a wheel and possibly win a (smaller) INSTANT prize — normally a Lead-free toy, or light-up toy, or something along those lines!
The boys will be doing bubbles and giving out bubble wands to children throughout the day, too.
There *may* be unicycling, too (depending on the terrain – which we haven’t seen this year, yet!)

This event is not sponsored by any corporate sponsor. This year we anticipate that the event will cost us about $1,500 in supplies and equipment costs, but this is an event we LOVE doing for our community here in Oregon! If you know of a potential corporate partner who might like to help us cover costs for this event next year – or for similar outreach events like this one in the future (later on this year, next year, and beyond), please do let us know!

We hope to see you there!

A little bit on Lead Safe Mama’s history with the NWWRF:

The Northwest World Reggae Festival was one of the very first concerts or festivals that we ever had an outreach booth at. We started doing this c. 2009 (it was either 2009 or 2010 – I can’t remember exactly – but I do remember Charlie was still a baby at our first festival – and he was born in July of 2008!) As most of my children were still quite young at the time and we didn’t want to be too close to the loud music (but still wanted to enjoy the festival!), we set our booth (and tent) up in the children’s area which was a little quieter and a bit out of the way (this year we will be in the MainStage area).

This was years before I had founded a nonprofit, years before I created a business (Lead Safe Mama, LLC) for Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention – these were our very first outreach events – the events that laid the foundation for the work that we are doing now. We invited business to donate products for prizes to give away at our booth – and they did! (Each year we participated Green Toys donated cases and cases of their Lead-free toys to give away even though we were not affiliated with a nonprofit and had almost no website presence at that time.)

All of this came about because Lindsay (our babysitter when the boys were poisoned in 2005) was (in 2009 / 2010) the event coordinator for the Northwest World Reggae Festival at the time and she invited us to participate and have an outreach booth (this was long before she got her law degree, got married and started her own family!) So thank you so much to Lindsay for being an inspiring force in moving the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC forward (in addition to being there when our kids were poisoned and helping us deal with the chaos that erupted at the time – we couldn’t have gotten through it without your help and partnership!)

Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama