CCOAL Founder and GCLAC Co-Chair Robin Brown, Mayor's Assistant Kim Woodson and East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer meet at his office in City Hall to strategize on lead poisoning eradication in his community

In a major development for the residents of East Cleveland, last Friday, August 10, 2006, I facilitated a meeting of Robin Brown, the founder of Concerned Citizens Organized Against Lead (CCOAL) and co-chair of the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC) Outreach and Advocacy sub-committee, with Mayor Brewer and some of his staff to discuss programs, funding and support available to the city of East Cleveland and its residents through CCOAL, for which I am on the Board of Directors, and GCLAC, for which I serve as co-chair of the Infrastructure and Sustainability sub-committee. Later that evening, Robin spoke before the residents of East Cleveland at the Mayor's weekly community forum, at the Helen S. Brown Senior Citizens Center, which was also broadcast live and recorded for re-broadcast on East Cleveland's cable television system. This marks a major launch of a public awareness campaign on the hazards of lead for residents of East Cleveland, where the issue of lead pisoning is in many ways the worst in the state of Ohio.

In addition to launching a public awareness campaign, which will be greatly expanded, Robin, the mayor and I discussed how to activate for East Cleveland all the benefits available through partnership with the GCLAC and CCOAL, and we planned the creation of a CCOAL sub-committee entirely dedicated to eradicating lead poisoning in East Cleveland by 2010. As such, we have positioned East Cleveland to have unique support to address this crisis. More to post on this soon.