What does the C3 Foundation do for people who want to change their drinking?
In September 2021, I spoke with Jenny Williamson of the C3 Foundation. Claudia Christian founded the nonprofit to spread the word about the Sinclair Method for alcohol use disorder, and Jenny runs most of its daily work. We talked about who reaches out, why doctors often miss the chance to help, and how hard it is to keep a small charity going.
This is an archive episode, recorded when the show covered addiction and recovery broadly.
At 0:17, Jenny explained that Claudia simply liked the sound of the name. In fact, the letters stand for no three specific words, and the organization is not technically a foundation.
Why does the usual approach seem to expect people to fail?
At 2:05, I said that every time I see the Sinclair Method work in my practice, I am still surprised. The thing that is harming a person becomes part of the treatment, and patients tell me they no longer even like the taste of alcohol.
Jenny believes that surprise comes from low expectations. At 2:46, she said the best available figures for abstinence-based programs show most people relapsing within a few years. In her view, the field is primed for people to fail, and that alone is a problem.
At 3:26, I said I have never liked motivating people with other people’s failures. If a group leader told me most of the room would not make it, I would get up and look for another program.
What changes when medication takes away the cravings?
At 4:36, I compared the Sinclair Method with buprenorphine for opioid use disorder. When medication takes away the cravings, people can go back to work and care for their families instead of pouring everything into fighting the urge.
Unfortunately, Jenny said at 5:38, the people who find the foundation are rarely sent there by a doctor. They are often up late at night searching for any shred of hope. Many read the science before they ever raise the method with a physician.
What does the foundation actually offer?
From 9:11, Jenny gave a full picture. She described the foundation as a bridge between people who are ready to change the role alcohol plays in their lives and the medical and mental health providers trained to help them. It is not a treatment provider and has no connection to the companies that make naltrexone.
Instead, it builds resources, such as a provider finder, drink tracking tools, and peer support groups. It also offers the documentary One Little Pill and Roy Eskapa’s book The Cure for Alcoholism.
Interestingly, Jenny said the method rests on Pavlov’s work on extinction, and that naltrexone is not the only medication that can be used this way.
Who reaches out, and why does early help matter?
At 17:25, Jenny described two kinds of people who consider the method for themselves. The first are exhausted by years of overdrinking and by efforts that did not last. The second group excites her most. They notice early that they are uncomfortable with how much they drink.
Some of them never need the medication and make the change on their own. Others want the Sinclair Method to put the brakes on before things get worse.
What does “drink responsibly” really mean?
Jenny was critical of prevention as it stands. Before the legal drinking age the message is not to drink at all, and then it changes to drink responsibly. Yet no one defines what responsible means. At 20:54, I said that to me the phrase sounds a lot like “drink more.”
At 21:08, she raised a point I agreed with at 23:07. People are often said to be in denial about their drinking. However, she has heard from many who asked their doctor about cutting down and were told they were fine. She sees this especially in new mothers whose drinking rose after pregnancy and nursing.
Why have osteopathic doctors been more open to the Sinclair Method?
At 26:45, I suggested the foundation exhibit at conventions for doctors of osteopathic medicine (DOs) once live events returned. Jenny said at 27:18 that the first providers on its list skewed heavily toward DOs, who tended to dig into the evidence and ask how and why the method works.
I said at 28:28 that osteopathic training carries a habit of keeping an open mind and looking at the whole person rather than a single disease. Jenny added that people want their doctor to be a partner in their health, not someone who writes a prescription and sends them on their way.
How common is heavy drinking?
At 30:13, I described something I noticed in my own work. When I talked with patients taking buprenorphine about their families, I often learned that a parent, sibling, or spouse had a problem with alcohol.
At 31:35, Jenny recalled, with some caution, a figure suggesting that a large share of American adults drink above the moderate guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Heavy drinking, in her account, is far from rare.
Why is it so hard to fund this kind of work?
At 32:09, I asked why alcohol has never received the kind of public health effort we saw for HIV and COVID. Jenny answered at 32:53 that funding is the foundation’s biggest issue. With only two people, she and Claudia split everything from coaching to grant writing, budgeting, and physician outreach.
Most funders, she explained, prefer tightly restricted program grants, some want the program to be new, and most will not pay for the staff to run it. Of course, what a small team needs is money to hire staff.
At 41:50, I said I first heard of the method from a patient who had seen Claudia Christian talk about it.
Who is Jenny Williamson?
Jenny Williamson works alongside Claudia Christian at the C3 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of the Sinclair Method. She steers its fundraising, grant writing, volunteer management, program creation, physician outreach, and communications, and she sits on its board.
What can listeners take away from this conversation?
A person who is uneasy about their drinking does not have to wait for a crash, and they do not have to rely on willpower alone. Still, they may need to find a doctor who will listen, read the evidence, and work with them as a partner. Small organizations like this one often do the work of connecting people with that help.
How do I approach this today?
My thinking has kept developing since this conversation was recorded. Today my practice is built on one idea that runs through all of it: when the body has adapted to a substance, the safest way off is usually gradual, with the smallest steps the person’s nervous system can tolerate. Physical dependence is not addiction.
For alcohol dependence I use the Sinclair Method. The person takes naltrexone about an hour before drinking, and over time the drinking itself becomes less rewarding, so the urge fades gradually instead of being fought every day. It does not require stopping on day one, and it does not rely on willpower or meetings.
Like a slow taper, it lets the brain change at its own pace. For many people that makes it a more humane path than a sudden stop, which can also be medically dangerous for someone whose body depends on alcohol.
Call 911 or go to an emergency department if there is a seizure, confusion or hallucinations, or thoughts of self-harm. For thoughts of suicide or any mental health crisis, you can also call or text the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
This page is educational. It is not medical advice, and listening to the episode or reading this page does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Decisions about starting, continuing, or tapering any medication should be made with your own physician.
Full transcript
A note from Dr. Leeds: my guests speak from their own experience and expertise, and the terminology they use is their own. Whatever the topic, this show holds to one distinction: physical dependence on a prescribed medication is not addiction. This transcript is educational content, not medical advice, and nothing here creates a doctor-patient relationship.
Read the full transcript (48 minutes)
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:00] Jenny Williamson, welcome to the podcast.
Jenny Williamson [00:02] Thank you, Mark. It’s great to be here.
Dr. Mark Leeds [00:04] The C3 Foundation, you guys help educate the world about medically assisted treatment for alcoholism or alcohol use disorder. Where did the name come from, C3 Foundation?
Jenny Williamson [00:17] That’s actually a fun little story. People always think that there’s some great deep meaning behind it, but Claudia liked the way it sounded. Her family name also has her last name is C, in addition to Claudia Christian. So she took the three C’s and made it C3 Foundation. The advisor she had helping her set everything up was not really all that clear on the fact that there are very specific definitions for the word foundation, especially in the nonprofit realm. And so what we ended up with was a very professional sounding name in C3 Foundation that does not actually legitimately stand for any three specific C’s. And we are not a foundation.
Dr. Mark Leeds [01:10] For people listening, Claudia Christian was the founder or is the founder of the foundation. And of course, people can find her videos and information online, her books. And she was very successful in overcoming alcoholism or alcohol use disorder with the Sinclair method, which is a form of medication assisted treatment for alcoholism. And so, yeah, that makes sense. Claudia Christian, I kind of guessed the two C’s. I was just wondering about the third C. So that makes sense.
Jenny Williamson [01:37] She founded C3 in 2013 after her own decade long struggle with addictive binge drinking. And she talks a lot about that in her TEDx talk as well. But out of that, C3 Foundation became the world’s only nonprofit organization that is dedicated to raising awareness specifically about the Sinclair Method for treating and preventing alcohol use disorder.
Dr. Mark Leeds [02:05] The Sinclair Method, I’ve been using it in my practice for a couple of years now. And every single time I see it work, I’m shocked. I’m like, well, you know, it’s funny. You think by now I would just be expecting success every time. And it’s just unbelievable. You just wouldn’t think that such a thing could work. I mean, you know, the thing that’s basically killing you, that we need to take it away, you know, alcohol. You need to avoid it. But no, it actually, the alcohol is part of the treatment. It’s really an interesting treatment. And every single time I’m shocked and my patients are shocked, like, wow, this really works. This is incredible. I don’t want to drink anymore. I don’t even like the taste of it anymore, you know, even after a few treatments. So I can see why everybody gets so excited about it.
Jenny Williamson [02:46] Well, I think the shock comes from the fact that in your most popular abstinence-based treatment modalities, the best figures that we can see is that in the first year, there’s about a 75% relapse rate. And in the first four years, that jumps to 90%. So 90% of the people who are going through traditional treatment are expected for that treatment to fail them within four years. So we’re primed in addiction, especially alcohol addiction, for people to fail. And that alone is problematic.
Dr. Mark Leeds [03:26] That’s something I never liked about, you know, that you hear that in, you know, stories about rehab, that they try to motivate people by other people’s failures. You know, saying, you know, they say, look around you. Most of the people in this room are not going to make it. If you want to be that one person that makes it, make sure that you do everything right. And, you know, why would that motivate people? If I heard that, you know, sitting in a room in a circle of people in a group meeting and the moderator tells me 90% of you are going to fail. I would think I should get up and walk out and find another program.
Jenny Williamson [03:57] Absolutely. I mean, if someone told me that I had a chronic illness that was going to be with me for the rest of my life and it was untreatable, but I had to sit there and now devote all of my mental capacity and resources and emotions to trying to follow some regimented set of instructions that are bound to fail me. You’re telling me that I’m most likely going to fail. It just seems to me that I would want something that was going to help me build a better quality of life.
Dr. Mark Leeds [04:36] What you just said really says a lot about the state of addiction treatment is that when people don’t use medication-assisted treatment, they really have to put all of their mental resources towards recovering. When we have people, for example, that take Suboxone for opioid use disorder and it takes away the cravings and the opioid withdrawal sickness and they’re able to function. I mean, they’re able to go back to work and take care of their families and think and be successful and even do new things in their lives. And the same thing with the Sinclair method. I just interviewed somebody about a similar treatment for methamphetamine and cocaine addiction, you know, things that can take away the cravings and the obsession, rather than a person having to put all of their mental resources towards that, you know, just nonstop praying and hoping and talking to people and writing. I mean, not that those are bad things, but to have to put everything that you have towards fighting those cravings. When it’s possible to take a medical treatment, they can take that away, and now you can just go live your life and do other things also.
Jenny Williamson [05:38] Absolutely. And we hear that a lot. We hear from people who they’ve come to us. This is what they believe is their last opportunity. If this is going to work or they’re going to die. It’s a pretty common theme among a lot of people that they’re desperate. And unfortunately, it’s not the doctors and the addiction specialists who are screening these people and saying, hey, you know, there’s a medication that can help you reduce or eliminate the alcohol from your life. These are people who are up at all hours of the night, desperately seeking the internet for any shred of hope that the alcohol that is controlling them can somehow no longer be the one in control. And, you know, they’ll come across us. You know, sometimes it’s because they find Claudia’s TEDx talk that she did with the London Business School a few years ago. But this causes these people to go in and they’re doing massive amounts of research before they’re even talking to a doctor about this. They’re looking at peer-reviewed science. They’re coming into our peer support groups and they’re asking people questions. And they so desperately want something that is going to help. And they feel like this is it. This is their last effort. And the fact that the addiction industry as a whole, which is multiple billions of dollars a year, continues to push people toward having to wrap everything into focusing on just fighting cravings when there’s something that can help them get rid of them. It says a lot for the industry. That’s why we love having doctors and nurse practitioners and medical professionals all across the board, like yourself, who are using the Sinclair Method in your patients, because it really shouldn’t have to be that hard to get help.
Dr. Mark Leeds [07:41] No, it shouldn’t have to be hard. And it’s crazy that people have to make those decisions between programs when you start googling and you see these well-established addiction treatment programs out there that you know and they say we’ll handle everything you know just give us your insurance card and if everything checks out you stay with us for a month and then you get there and you find out that it’s basically a you know what I like to call a thin wrapper around the 12-step a program you’re basically there to sit in group meetings that are very similar to an a meeting and very little interaction with an with an actual psychologist or psychiatrist or in a lot of cases any interaction even with a doctor at all. And there’s that big joke that people spend $30,000 to go to rehab to find out that meetings are free. It’s just crazy. And just the pushback against medication-assisted treatment of any kind of programs saying we don’t believe in any kind of medication to be used for addiction treatment. I mean, they’re really back in the dark ages when it comes to addiction treatment in general. So it’s incredible that when people do search online, Now they’re finding Claudia’s video. They’re finding the C3 Foundation. Where’s the C3 Foundation going from here? I know that you’re providing a lot of education and you’re helping people to find doctors that are providing treatment. And I know that’s not an easy thing to do because I’ve tried to do something similar on one of my websites of having a resource to help people find resources for treatment. And just to even keep up with that is a really difficult task for one person.
Jenny Williamson [09:11] Yeah, it definitely is. Considering we are still only two people, we do have some interesting struggles with how that all happens. But before we get into that, let me just talk a little bit about what C3 Foundation does, because I think that kind of sets the stage for what it is that we’re trying to do in the future. My elevator pitch that I use when I’m at an addiction conference and talking to a brand new doctor, I usually just start with saying that, you know, the C3 Foundation acts as a bridge between people who are ready to change the role that alcohol plays in their life and the medical and mental health providers that are trained to help them achieve that. We’re not a direct treatment provider. We don’t directly admit people. We don’t provide them with medication. As you mentioned before, we do a lot of education and resources. So let me just start with talking a little bit about what we don’t do, because it’s amazing how much this comes up. As I said, we’re not direct treatment providers. And that really confuses people. I get calls and emails from people who want to know how much our program costs and if they need to come to Florida where our office is so that they can do TSM. But that’s not at all how we’re set up. We also, we don’t work with the naltrexone manufacturers. I am amazed by the number of people who contact us or call me and want me to connect them with the global manufacturers of naltrexone. And we’re not even connected to the manufacturers. We’re not here to spread the message and the gospel of naltrexone. And I know a lot of people seem to think that we are, but our mission is really to provide resources and information about a very specific way of taking opioid antagonists like naltrexone to reverse alcohol addiction in the brain. And as you know, it’s based on Pavlov’s extinction theory, but naltrexone worldwide isn’t even the only medication that can be used. We’re not direct treatment providers. We’re not working with the pharmaceutical industry. So I do want to put that right out there because those are two huge misconceptions. So what do we do? Well, as I said before, we act as a bridge. Bridges connect. We connect highly motivated people who they’re ready to reduce or eliminate alcohol from their life. We connect them with the medical and mental health professionals who are trained and qualified to treat them. So we do a lot of original resource creation using peer-reviewed science. We do a lot of alcohol moderation and harm reduction education and tools with that. We have peer support. And one of the biggest and most important resources that we’ve had is our find a provider tool. And you mentioned educating doctors and doctors and the mental health community. Doctors, as you know, you’ve got a lot on your plate. There’s a lot for you to know. You have very specific requirements for your continuing medical education. These are things that we want to try to get the Sinclair method poised to be included in, but that’s going to be taking some time. So what we do with our find a provider tools is we’ve got two different things set up. We’ve got our telemedicine page, And that’s organized by state, country, and province. And in each section, people only find the TSM providers who are licensed in that area. And then we’ve got a provider map with traditional medical offices. And, well, we’re working on overhauling that tool because while it’s much better than what we used to have, we’ve actually grown to the point where the plugin is not nearly as user-friendly as it used to be. So we are working on updating that. But when people go to the page, they can zoom in, they can perform a limited search, they can find a provider in their area, and then they can find the help that they need. We’ve got pill holder key chains that act as medication adherence tools. We’ve got drink tracking tools. And the drink tracking tools, we’ve got a spreadsheet format that people can download and customize for free. And we’ve got a free app that’s ad-free that was created by a volunteer. Here. It’s available on both Android and iOS. We moderate and manage, with the help of some amazing volunteers, by the way, several peer support groups on Facebook that cater specifically to people on the Sinclair Method. We have a group that is for any level of interest in learning more about the Sinclair Method. We’ve got one that supports loved ones and friends so that it’s focused on the support system needs because alcohol addiction affects more than just the drinker. We’ve got a forum. Combined, we’ve got about 10,000 people from all around the world in our community groups. We do multimedia resources. We’ve got our award-winning documentary Film One Little Pill. We’ve got blog articles. We just finished a six-month-long set of weekly live streams on our Twitch channel. We’ve got testimonial videos. Of course, there’s always Claudia’s TEDx talk, which is how I overcame alcoholism. And that’s been seen more than 3 million times. We’ve got a specific resource page website for medical and mental health professionals. And we even have a science of TSM Facebook group for specifically people who are looking at the research end of things. And we’ve just finished up our second annual conference. We’ve got copies of Roy Eskapa’s The Cure for Alcoholism and Claudia’s Babylon Confidential that we sell, and also Journeys, which is the opposite of what you were speaking of earlier, people trying to motivate by failure. Journeys is a book of personal stories that are predominantly success stories. And I want to say from the time Claudia started collecting these personal testimonies and stories until it was released last year, I think the book took nearly four years to come together. And it’s a really powerful collection of stories. So while we’re not a facility and while we’re not a treatment program ourselves, we still do have a lot of direct individual support. Claudia is a credentialed peer support specialist. She’s developed and steered our TSM virtual coaching program called Your Sinclair Method, and she’s built a team of currently six coaches around the world, including herself. It may sound like we can do anything, but it’s amazing what we’ve done considering the limitations on our funding.
Dr. Mark Leeds [16:28] I was thinking there’s probably like three main groups of the kinds of people that might visit the C3 Foundation. Patients, families, and healthcare providers. You know, patients who are looking for any kind of answer to help. People that need treatment or want treatment and they want more information and they’re just out there searching. Then you have family members who may be their person, their loved one who might already know about the Sinclair Method and they want to know, is this a real thing? You know, I need to know more about it. Or maybe they’re looking for the first time trying to find answers. And then you have health care providers who either have heard from a patient. Probably that’s the most likely reason a health care provider would visit is that some patient has said, I want to try the Sinclair method. And like you said, a busy doctor who doesn’t really have time to, you know, to look into things like this. They just, they want some answers. They want to know that they’re doing the right thing by giving a patient a prescription and allowing them to try this method out.
Jenny Williamson [17:25] Yeah. And that’s why we have a specific website for medical and mental health professionals. We wanted to strip it down to just the information that would be needed without the extra overflow, which can be accessed on our primary webpage. We wanted to put it together with time limitations in mind. So yeah, we definitely have medical and mental health community and family members reach out. When it comes to prospective people on TSM, though, we really have two very different basic groups of people who are interested in potentially using the Sinclair method for themselves. The first being the most obvious, and that’s people who are just so tired of overdrinking. You know, I mean, maybe they’ve seen a scary decline in their health or lost a job or a relationship and sometimes lots of jobs and relationships. And they’re just so tired of being disappointed in themselves and feeling like they’re disappointing others. And as I said earlier, most people in this category, they know that everything else that they’ve tried has failed and that no matter how much willpower they exert, maintaining sobriety in an environment where everyone, sometimes including yourself, expects failure. It’s exhausting and it’s ultimately unsustainable. And then the second group, and if I’m honest, this is the group that enthuses me the most. These are people who are proactively noticing that they’re not comfortable with how much they’re drinking. They might not even be meeting that threshold for alcohol use disorder yet, but somehow they hear about us and they reach out. And some of these people, they’re not even going to need the Sinclair method. And that’s fine. They take what they learned from our resources and they’re able to make that change on their own. But some have realized that, yes, they do need the Sinclair method to help them put the brakes on what they see because they know that addiction is a bad road to go down and they want to get off that ride before the safeties all crumble on them. They don’t want to do a rock bottom in order to finally realize that they can slow down. And a lot of that comes to alcohol addiction prevention. You know, the efforts right now, they’re so flawed. We have a dichotomous system in place that has a break point at legal drinking age. Before legal drinking age, prevention is simply don’t drink because the grand old just say no has always worked so spectacularly. But that’s literally what you’ve got before drinking age. And then magically on your birthday, when you are legally able to drink, all of the prevention just turns to drink responsibly. But responsibly isn’t defined because you’re not going to have every person suddenly go to the CDC website on their legal drinking age birthday and try to figure out what is said about this. It’s so nebulous that people don’t even really comprehend what responsible drinking is until it’s kind of too late.
Dr. Mark Leeds [20:54] With alcohol, the money is on the side of the alcohol producers. I mean, the message out there is no matter how you look at it’s drink more. You know, drink responsibly to me sounds like drink more, drink as much as you can without hurting anybody, hopefully.
Jenny Williamson [21:08] Right. Because, you know, what does responsible drinking even mean? I mean, does it mean that you’re just not driving drunk? Is it more responsible to drink a fifth of tequila every night at home and not go anywhere than it is to drink three beers and get in your car once a month? Responsibility is, it’s nebulous, it’s vague. And so that also kind of leads into the whole blaming the drinker for their addiction. And one of the things that people love to say, and I cringe every time I hear it, is that alcohol addiction is characterized by denial. But the reality of the situation as I’ve seen it is that I’ve had so many people tell me that they sought advice from their doctors about cutting down their alcohol intake. And their doctor said, well, you’re not really drinking that much. You’re okay. So, I mean, that’s problematic when you have somebody who’s already not comfortable with how much they’re drinking going to their doctor and their doctor saying, hey, you’re fine. So now you’ve got somebody else telling you’re fine. So you’re going to want to believe that notion and you’re going to cling to the notion that you’re okay. Then people are calling you a liar and in denial because you’re trying to hold on to what a professional who dropped the opportunity to help you told you were fine. I see this, especially in new mothers. I’ve had so many people tell me that their addiction really set in after the birth of one of their children because they stopped drinking while they were pregnant. And then as soon as they were done nursing, their drinking really ramped up. And their doctor said, well, you know, that’s normal. And years later, they’re battling addiction. That could have been prevented.
Dr. Mark Leeds [23:07] Yeah, definitely. I mean, we would hope that the person’s family doctor would be a person to turn to with addiction issues. But yeah, unfortunately, doctor is not always the best resource in that area.
Jenny Williamson [23:17] That’s where our struggle really is. We can tell the general public all we want about the Sinclair Method. And how it’s saving people’s lives and changing them for the better and allowing them to reclaim their feeling of purpose and success in life. But if they go to a doctor who is unwilling to even research the Sinclair method or research naltrexone, then they get shot down. And you never want to take somebody who is highly motivated to make a change and pull the rug out from under them. It’s such a lost opportunity. So we put a lot of our efforts on trying to really educate doctors. And I can’t wait until we’re able to start doing in-person conference exhibits again so that we can really start getting the message back out to doctors and recruit and educate more.
Dr. Mark Leeds [24:17] It’s a lot of work. I mean, I can imagine, like, even if you wanted to have a booth at a large medical convention, Those things are expensive and time consuming. And even doing that would just be one medical convention in one city at one particular time. When you talk about doing that kind of thing in-person education, would that be like a dedicated C3 Foundation event, a live event?
Jenny Williamson [24:39] We are probably going to continue doing ours as virtual events because then we can continue using the material over and over. In fact, once again, thank you so much for being part of this year’s Sinclair Method Conference, Stronger Than Your Drink. The collective videos that we put up on YouTube, separating all of those panels, have already been seen more than 1,100 times. And it’s only been six, seven weeks since that conference. That kind of continued momentum, we simply can’t generate that with an in-person conference. So for us, staying virtual right now allows for a much larger impact. So when we’re doing in-person conferences, it’s more exhibit tables. We’ve had great success as exhibitors with the ASAM conferences. And so we’re really excited about getting back to those next year. I think about at one point, our provider tool had been populated by somewhere around 40% of the leads came from the American Society of Addiction Medicine conferences that we went to. Yes, they’re expensive on a nonprofit public charity budget, but we have found that it’s worth it. And because there’s still only two of us, that means that instead of an organization paying these marketing professionals to go populate their booths with scripts that they’ve memorized or however they do that, When people come to our exhibit tables, they’re literally seeing myself and where her schedule allows, Claudia. So they’re coming to our table and they are seeing the entirety of the organization. And there’s a lot of power in that as well, because there’s no question we can’t field.
Dr. Mark Leeds [26:45] I would love to see you guys, when live conferences come back, if you’re able to ever do some osteopathic conventions. Because osteopathic doctors, in general, they tend to be very open-minded, and especially the younger ones coming out of school and residency. And you might get a really great audience of doctors who are willing to spread the word. I’ve seen some great interactions at the conventions with the vendors and the young osteopathic doctors. Learning about new things and getting really excited about it?
Jenny Williamson [27:18] We noticed that very early on as well. The initial set of TSM providers that we had listed skewed very heavily in DOs as opposed to MDs. Some of that was because early on, Claudia was invited to speak at two low-dose naltrexone conferences, which also have a heavy osteopath representation amongst their members. And so we have always found that to be very true is that the osteopaths tend to be a lot more willing to look at the information and ask the questions that they need to ask. How does this work? Why does this work? What can you give me to back this up, that this works, and they’ll actually really dig in. And there’s a different mentality that I’ve noticed, not to criticize any other medical group, but we’ve just noticed that in the osteopathic community, there was much earlier acceptance of the Sinclair method.
Dr. Mark Leeds [28:28] I think it’s maybe somewhere in the, even though the education is very rigorous, it seems like there’s an element that’s pervasive throughout osteopathic education, of keeping an open mind and being open-minded about new things that come along. And there was definitely people interested in health and nutrition and the idea of looking at the whole person and taking in everything and not just focusing on a disease. So it does make sense.
Jenny Williamson [28:55] It really does. And we appreciate that too, because addiction, medicine in general, and addiction specifically because of the stigma, it’s so personal. And when people walk into their provider’s office, no matter what that provider’s credentials, what they really want is somebody to listen to them and actually hear what they’re saying and how the condition they’re talking about impacts their life and how they want it improved. And our bodies, our minds, they’re not all silos. And you can’t just focus on one aspect of a person and expect that it’s not going to have a ripple effect through the rest of their life. And so I have found that the more open-minded a person’s TSM provider is, the greater the feedback we get on them, the higher the success seems to be because people want to feel like their doctor is not just prescribing them a medication and sending them on their way. They want their doctor to be a partner in their health.
Dr. Mark Leeds [30:13] The problem, you know, when some people think as far as, you know, know, they look at addiction statistics, that addiction is a, maybe a relatively small percentage of, you know, people in the population that maybe it’s a relatively small percentage, which, depending on how you look at it, I mean, right now we’re in a pandemic with a disease that kills 1% of the people that get it. And we’re finding that 1% is a lot, you know, when you have hospitals overrun with people getting sick. So even if addiction were something that only affected 1% of the population, that’s still a huge problem. But it seems like it’s much bigger than that, especially when you look at alcohol. When I talk to my patients with opioid use disorder that are taking buprenorphine or Suboxone for opioid addiction, and we start talking about their families, and even these people, like these parents that call me and they want to find out what’s happening with their kid who’s on Suboxone and how are they doing and they’re so worried about them. You know, I often find out that same parent or brother, sister, spouse, that they have an alcohol problem. And it’s just pervasive through families. You know, just when you start talking to people about their families, like just so many people, you know, everybody knows someone with an addiction problem, but everybody seems to know a lot of people with an alcohol problem. Maybe you know the statistics on it, but it just seems like it’s everywhere. I mean, it must be a huge percentage of the population.
Jenny Williamson [31:35] I believe one of the, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the statistic, but I somewhat recall hearing one out of three, I’m sorry, no, three out of 10 adults in America drink above what’s considered the CDC moderate guidelines. So nearly a third of the population.
Dr. Mark Leeds [31:58] Wow. Yeah. And where’s our vaccine for alcoholism? The Sinclair method. Yeah, exactly.
Jenny Williamson [32:06] In some ways, it kind of is.
Dr. Mark Leeds [32:09] So you can imagine the resources that have gone behind other public health issues like HIV, rightfully so, the effort to turn that from a deadly illness into a chronic illness that can be treated. And now, of course, COVID, an incredible response to turn something deadly into something that we can live with. But alcoholism, I mean, what needs to be done? It doesn’t seem like the funding is there. I mean, you’re pretty much the only organization that I know of that’s really doing anything. And like you said, you’re two people. I mean, what needs to be done to make this like a real effort to overcome, you know, something that’s a bigger problem than any of these conditions, probably all of them combined.
Jenny Williamson [32:53] Yeah. And funding really is, I mean, I know for us, it’s really our biggest issue right now. I mean, we’re technically considered a micro business, which is the smallest of small businesses. Micro businesses generally operate on less than $250,000 a year. And we have always been incredibly below that threshold with only two of us and our volunteers. But, you know, our structure a little bit, you know, Claudia serves as a CEO. In addition to coaching and focusing on attracting large donors, she also typically does the forward-facing outreach appearances like podcasts and interviews. I tend to steer pretty much everything else with her support. Fundraising, budgeting, grant writing, volunteer management, program creation, launch and tracking, administration, physician outreach, communications, marketing, you name it. I mean, I’m already planning our end of year fundraising campaign and next year’s annual conference. So with only two of us, it becomes a precarious balance between actually helping people who are struggling with alcohol and in recovery and trying to get funding so we can keep the internet on and the websites working. We don’t want to be one of those organizations that seems to exist purely to go raise money. You know, that’s not why we’re doing this. We’re here for the people we help, for the lives that we change and help save. And that’s what keeps us plugging away. But without funding, we also become limited in the number of employees we have. There’s this amazing misconception that since Claudia is a celebrity and she’s currently got projects that are out and about and able to be seen on TV, that it means that everybody out there is falling all over themselves to give us money or that she’s some multimillionaire that has abundant personal resources to fund us. And trust me, Claudia and I both wish there was even a tiny little bit of shred of truth to any of that. What we’re doing, we have done this by, I mean, still after eight years, we’re both being paid for about half the time we work and we’re volunteering the rest of our time. I can’t even tell you how much memorabilia Claudia has donated over the years to help us raise money. Her, myself, most of our board of directors, we all donate regularly to keep things going. Claudia didn’t even take a salary at all until very recently. Early on, there were times that she had to pay me out of her own pocket because we didn’t have money in the organizational account to cover the small amount of money that I made. And so that becomes really problematic when we’re volunteering more time than we’re getting paid for still, we can’t attract qualified people and then fail to pay them as well. If we’re going to do this long-term, which we want to do, I mean, I will go on record time and time again saying, I want to retire doing what I’m doing because I feel so passionate about the work that C3 Foundation is doing. This is the rest of my life for me, but we can’t bring people in and not pay them. We can’t attract volunteer coordinators who want to work for free. We can’t do that. We can’t pay grant writers if we can’t pay them. So it’s just, it’s not good business and we have to be mindful of good business practices as well. So we’re forced to keep things small until we can afford to properly hire people. So we keep plugging away at grants and plugging away asking people for donations. And those have their own challenges. Grants, you know, for anyone who has never written a grant proposal, it’s funny because people seem to think, oh, just contact Bill and Melinda Gates and they’ll be happy to give you money because they have it. And it’s like, it doesn’t actually work that way. You know, we’ve got two basic flavors that grants usually come in. There’s program grants, which are generally very regimented and specific and restricted to a program. There’s so much that goes into reporting, making sure that a program grant, that those funds are being spent the way the person giving the money says. And then there’s unrestricted, which is sometimes capacity building grants, general fund grants. And unfortunately, the one that most funders like to write checks for are the program grants. So they’re looking for innovative new ideas and they want you to give them a comprehensive background and future and impact of your work. And then they give you a little block and tell you’ve got a 250 word maximum that you can explain the whole thing in. And I wish I was joking. Some of them are more generous with 500 words, but even that can be tough. And some of the foundations that give money, they want your program to be new. So they don’t want to, they don’t want to help bolster something that’s already existing. Some of them don’t want them focused on any education of any kind, which I always find a little bit odd. And then most don’t want to help pay for the staff that it’s going to take to run the program. So it becomes almost a little bit of a self-torture sometimes writing these grants. And creating a new nonprofit program, that takes a lot of work. And when you only have two people, Claudia and I are already at our capacity for what we can juggle. And if we can’t get funding to help bring in new people to help us run these programs better and to help us to manage our volunteers, then we get stuck in this little growth plateau, which is where we’re at now that we’re trying to break out of. You know, so what we’re truly looking for right now are more like capacity building grants, money that’s going to let us hire a part-time staff person, someone that can help with a variety of our projects, and donors who are willing to commit $5,000 or more, you know, maybe on an annual basis for a couple of years.
Dr. Mark Leeds [39:46] And there’s people out there that, you know, a lot of people that they give money to things, you know, the people that give money to their school, to their high school, to their college, or maybe to their local theater, summer camps, or, you know, maybe they give to organizations that help children, feed the children, feed the homeless, which are important things. But then you might also think, why are the children hungry? Why are the people homeless? Alcohol is behind a lot of things out there. You’re working with a program that they say has a 78% success rate. I’ve seen at least in the short term, probably near 100%. You know, I can’t really think of too many people that have had failure on this program. It’s really like almost 100% as far as a person tries it. They’re like, wow, it’s working. It’s making me not want to drink as much. I mean, you know, maybe the people that do have failures are the ones along the way that stop doing it. You know, or maybe they have pressure from around them that they need to do something else, which is a major thing in addiction treatment, the biggest source of failure I see in addiction treatment overall is peer pressure. You know, people telling their loved ones or whoever, you know, you don’t, I don’t agree with what you’re doing. Do it my way because this is what I’ve seen work. There’s people out there that they’re advised by their financial advisor that you should donate a certain amount of money to a charity every year. And so they have to pick something and they might pick, you know, maybe they pick the local public library or something, or, you know, they get a little brick with her name on it at a school or something or whatever. But I mean, this is something, you know, there’s an opportunity here for those same people to send some of that money in the direction of something that’s really saving lives and making a difference in people’s lives. And everybody has someone in their family or many people in their family or friends. Everybody knows someone with a problem with alcohol. I mean, there’s really an opportunity for a lot of people out there, just not even to spend more money, but maybe just direct that same amount of money they’re already giving to something that can really make a difference. I would think people who have had success with the Sinclair Method, and I’m sure in that group of people, there are some people that are also in that category of people that donate regularly to charities, and that would be great if more people who have seen success with it, either personally or within their own family, if they could think of donating even a small amount or a large amount to help out the program. Because it’s something that if there’s no one out there talking about it, And I mean, it is something you can imagine a world where if you guys were to shut down and stop talking about it, that very quickly the conversation might end. I mean, otherwise, I mean, really like when I first learned about it was a patient coming into my office who said, I saw this actress, Claudia Christian, talking about this Sinclair Method. Otherwise, I had never heard about it. I’ve never heard anything about it. So it’s really extremely important what you’re doing. And, you know, for people to sit back and wait for someone else to help out, it’s really important for all of us to help out. And I think you even have a program where people can help out a little bit to just give a little bit every month.
Jenny Williamson [42:52] That’s our Crusaders program. And that’s a minimum of $25 a month recurring donation. And there’s some special perks, like there’s a monthly newsletter written by Claudia. And then as soon as we reach 50 Crusaders, we’re going to start doing every six months, we’ll have special video calls where people can call in and chat with Claudia and interact with her in a group setting that’s going to be strictly active Crusaders only. But it is incredibly difficult to run a global charity on $25 donations. Donations. Our crusaders are definitely doing a lot to help to ease some of the day-to-day operating. And we’ve got maybe a half a dozen other donors who regularly contribute larger amounts, and we’re so grateful for them as well. But to be honest, right now, it’s our corporate sponsorships from doctors who are using the Sinclair Method and paying for banner space on our website and our conference that are really what’s keeping us going right now. But, you know, the conference takes a whole lot more work than one person with a small group of volunteers can realistically handle.
Dr. Mark Leeds [44:11] So if I know someone, you know, like just say, for example, […] Like, where would I tell her to go to get started with that?
Jenny Williamson [44:26] C3foundation.org slash crusaders.
Dr. Mark Leeds [44:30] So it’s c3foundation.org slash crusaders.
Jenny Williamson [44:35] So another thing that we, that Claudia and I have been talking a lot about is that maybe for anybody who happens to be listening out there who has a lot of nonprofit experience and board experience, we’re at a point where we are actively looking to grow and diversify our board. I mean, we do skew heavily toward women on the board. We have five total members and four of us are women. So we have that going for us, but there’s a distinct lack of racial diversity that we would also like to change. But we need qualified board candidates who have strong fundraising skills and who are deeply knowledgeable in nonprofit compliance. We want to be able to reach as many diverse communities as possible. We would love a board member who speaks fluently in another language and can connect with others using a shared cultural background. But we need people who truly see the value in helping make TSM the most well-known and accepted treatment for alcohol use disorder and prevention because alcohol addiction doesn’t discriminate. We need the Sinclair method to be available to anyone who needs it, no matter who they are or what their background. And so if somebody is out there and maybe they don’t have the financial capacity personally to donate, but they’re a strong fundraiser and they have great connections and they’re interested in being a board member to help us grow and to help steer us and to take some of the fundraising off of my shoulders so that I can work more on the program development and things like that. So that’s another area of opportunity where someone who is well-connected and experienced with nonprofit boards could really help make a huge difference on a global scale.
Dr. Mark Leeds [46:42] It’s very important that people visit the C3 Foundation, c3foundation.org slash crusaders, and get involved, you know, help out and help spread the word. The Sinclair method is a treatment method that has an extremely high success rate in helping people to treat alcoholism or alcohol use disorder.
Jenny Williamson [47:03] If anybody wants to contact me directly, the contact form on our website comes directly to my email. So whether you’re a potential donor, a potential board member, a medical provider, or if you just need help for yourself or your family, please use the contact form and I will get back to you. I try to get back generally within a day or so please reach out. We’ve got so many resources. If you’re a medical provider, we’ve got treatment protocols, scientific resources. We’ve got two years worth of conference videos I can share with you. I can connect you with other doctors in your area that you can talk to. If there’s anything else you want to know about the Sinclair method or about the C3 Foundation, just use the contact form on our website, c3foundation.org, and I’m happy to talk to you.
Dr. Mark Leeds [47:58] Thank you, Jenny Williamson, for joining me today.
Jenny Williamson [48:00] Thanks, Mark. I appreciate it.
