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If women's health and quality of life is important to you, then you have come to the right place. |
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Hi, I'm Christine Kent, founder of Whole Woman Inc. and the Whole Woman Village. In 2003 I published the first and definitive book on non-surgical alternatives for pelvic organ prolapse and urinary incontinence called Saving the Whole Woman. The first version of the wholewoman.com site went up a few months later in January of 2004. My primary interest in putting up the site was seeing if I could teach other women online how to correct or at least improve and manage their pelvic organ prolapse as I had done for myself and women with whom i worked face-to-face.
The forum rapidly grew and women began writing their success stories: canceling surgeries, mountain biking, running marathons, lifting their growing children and grandchildren -- all things their doctors had told them they could never do again.
All was going smoothly until in early February 2010, the site was badly hacked and had to be taken down.
We had developed a vision a few years before to create a Village for the many women who had come to know, respect, love and enjoy each others' company on the Whole Woman Forum. And primarily, to create a place for women to learn. After two months of very hard work, we started up the Village in early April of 2010.
With the Village, we decided to introduce a membership component. The reason is simple.
We wanted to produce a flood of video, articles and other powerfully useful information for women. We wanted to extend our focus beyond just women's physical health to areas I believe are crucially important for women's quality of life: reconnecting to the living arts of food gathering, preparation and preservation, the fiber arts, dance and community.
Creating content is expensive business. It's very time consuming and in the case of video, requires very expensive equipment to do a quality job. Therefore, we felt a reasonable membership fee to access a steady stream of new content was a very fair trade. Whole Woman primarily supports itself through the sale of books and DVDs, but the modest membership fee will help offset some of the significant costs of operating the site.
The free and public features of the site are:
- The Whole Woman Village Post - a newspaper with articles about women’s health writen by me and noteable guest authors, a column from me, the founder of Whole Woman, and a review of a scientific article of interest to women.
- The Village Library - a growing collection of articles on women’s health and the living arts. Have an article, poem or artwork you would like to submit to the library? Your can read the Editorial Guidelines under the “Submissions” tab. In the Library are also resource pages of books and web sites by our guest authors and interviewees.
- The Village Theater showing The Whole Woman Solution to Pelvic Organ Prolapse and Urinary Incontinence (sounds like Oscar® material doesn’t it?) We’re calling it Whole Woman 101 for short. But it covers the basics of what you need to know about Pelvic Organ Prolapse.
- Our beloved Forum. (We have almost 4,000 members.)
- The Whole Woman Store carries our books, DVDs and other products important for women.
- Seedcraft, our herb store will be opening later in the year and be a store for the herbal remedies, balms and essential supplements.
For members only, we've added a number of new features:
- The Village Café is a chat room for more immediate and intimate interaction
- The Village Tavern (coming in the next few months) will showcase muscians, concerts, poetry and performance art delivered by video. Some will be pay-per-view.
- Christine’s Cottage, Christine and others will provide a series of short videos on raising, preparing and preserving food in “Christine’s Kitchen", videos on fiber arts projects in “Christine’s Sewing Room” and occasional Fireside Chats, short videos from time to time on issues of importance for women. New videos will be up approximately once a week.
- The Village Theater has a monthly feature of interest around health and other related issues including a number of interviews with prominent women and men. Our opening video features an in-depth interview with Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, one of the landmark books in feminist literature.
- At the Whole Woman Center, you’ll be able to workout with Christine. We are developing a variety of workouts from simple to intense. We’ll also have guest teachers in from time to time. Various dance instruction will probably be offered over time as well.
And that’s just the beginning. There are many more features we will be introducing in coming months. |
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We want membership to be within the reach of almost all women. So we’ve set the annual membership price at sixty dollars (US) That’s five dollars a month or less than sixteen and a half cents a day.
We’re doing all this because since I put up the Whole Woman site in January of 2004, almost four thousand women have registered on the forum. Many thousands more “lurk” or read and monitor the forum, sometimes for years. Lasting friendships have been formed at Whole Woman that transcend geographic boundaries.
All I set out to do was keep women out of the operating room and let them know there was a better way to deal with pelvic organ prolapse.
But along the way, Whole Woman has become so much more.
It’s become a Village, a home away from home for thousands of women. We’ve watched friendships blossom. We’ve watched women climb from despair to jubilation as they learned from me and from each other that we can take charge of our health and not be run roughshod by the pharma/medical/government complex.
So now we stand on the brink of a whole new incarnation for Whole Woman, the result of what you have brought to it.
I’ve always wanted to live in a Village, to be surrounded by people I’ve known all my life and trust. Where food comes out of the ground, not out of a plastic package, where skies are blue not brown and clean water flows freely from the tap.
Alas, the physical world isn’t that way. More and more of us are crammed into the planet and ironically, that makes us increasingly isolated.
However, there is the miracle of the Web. Now we can connect and build relationships around the world in real time. We can find our kindred spirits and create a virtual world that is all to which we might aspire, not to hide from the real world, but an oasis, a sanctuary for community, and refuge when life’s slings and arrows get to be a bit much.
There are more than three billion women on the planet. Many of them are not having a good time. The Village is a place where we can be of service to our sisters.
I hope you will join us.
Thank you for your time and interest and enjoy your visit to the Whole Woman Village.
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Sincerely, |
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PS. If you have any questions about membership, please call Nikelle in Customer Service at +1-505-314-1455 (in the US, GMT -7). She's normally available from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM, weekdays. If she's on the phone or out of the office, leave a number and she'll call back, even if it's overseas. You can also email her at nikelle(at)wholewoman(dot)com. Thanks!
PPS. Some fine print: While our plans and intentions are to produce a short video weekly in Christine's Cottage and a monthly Feature in the members' theater, unforseen events may make this schedule impractical. Other features may evolve and change based on customer requests, changes in technology and other factors. Therefore, we cannot make specific guarantees around site features and member benefits. We are committed building long-term relationships with our customers and members and know such relationships are only earned by delivering real value at reasonable cost. Thank you for understanding.
CAK