Wellness Within is a nonprofit wellness center for patients, survivors, caregivers, and families facing cancer and its aftermath. Located in downtown Roseville, our center offers a warm and inviting space for clients to relax, connect with others, and experience a sense of community. Our services are provided on a donate-if-and-what-you-can basis, ensuring that cost is barrier to no one. Our main programs include classes in Nutrition Education, Mindfulness and Meditation, Healing Movement, and Expressive Arts, all of which aim enhance an individual's ability to experience quality of life through practices that incorporate physical, emotional, and mental well-being. We also host guest speakers, offer resources through a lending library, and support and collaborate with regional cancer centers. In 2020, in response to the pandemic, we launched on-line programming to support our community during shelter-in-place restrictions. As a result, we now have a robust podcast presence, a large YouTube library, including a subset of videos translated into Spanish, and virtual Zoom classes. The result has been over 20,000 engagements with our programs and over 1,500 course hours of content provided. Additionally, we have been able to serve as a nexus of expertise in the online medium, with Doctors, Nurses, Social Workers and other experts in the complementary cancer care field located both regionally and nationally participating as guests on our podcasts. In 2022, we launched the online platform, BEACON™, a course-based system of our impactful content, efficiently organized by where a person may be in their cancer experience, such as in treatment or post-treatment, for example. BEACON™ also contains an orientation to the programming of Wellness Within, giving the background to why we do what we do, providing an introduction of the autonomic nervous system, the power of choice during the cancer experience, the impacts of mindfulness, nutrition, awareness and expression, and movement, contributing to client resilience and empowerment. All class calendars and online resources, including BEACON™, can be accessed from our website at www.wellnesswithin.org.
Wellness Within was opened with a firestorm raging in our hearts and a greater understanding of what it takes to support someone fighting cancer. Those who have survived the dreadful ordeal know it does not end when treatment stops. Cancer invades, turns lives upside down, raises all kinds of havoc and the financial burdens can be devastating. "Life altering" can be an understatement during and after treatment. Although great strides have been made in finding more effective treatments for some cancers, its wrath is relentless, causing much disruption in the lives of our loved ones. At Wellness Within we will not find a cure or raise money to find a cure, rather, we are in the trenches with people as they navigate a diagnosis and treatment, offering tools to restore healing, manage stress, and instill hope.
"Wellness Within provides invaluable services to patients, survivors and their families coping with a cancer diagnosis. I have been impressed with the results patients have experienced from participation in their programs. I have found Wellness Within's programs to compliment patient's medical treatments. I give my full endorsement to Wellness Within and am thankful for their incredible dedication and important work." - Ernie Bodai, M.D., F.A.C.S., Director, Breast Cancer Survivorship Institute