New Community Counseling and Ministries
Help for Cancer Patients
History
New Community Counseling and Ministries (NCCM) has been providing help, hope and practical solutions for people struggling with their mental and physical well being, for nearly 20 years. These services have included hospital visits, patient advocacy, paying for medication not covered by insurance, wheelchair bus transportation services, prayer support, helping the homeless with temporary shelter, adopt-a-family Christmas giving and events and more.
NCCM was originally founded by Christine Caridi-Jones in Naperville, Illinois, USA as a sliding-scale counseling service in 2006.
In 2009, as a result of the financial crises, Food Thing Network, an alternative food bank was born and added as a branch of New Community. Food Thing continues to this day to provide hundreds of people food every week via 4 different food distribution locations throughout the western suburbs of Chicago.
In February 2019, Christine was diagnosed with stage 3 Breast Cancer. One month later she was diagnosed with an extremely rare and dangerously aggressive Renal Cell Carcinoma. The RCC is considered un-staged and undifferentiated. As a result of needing support, in July of 2020, Christine and her husband Graeme founded an organization known as CCASH Group which stands for Cancer Cure Advocacy Self-Help Group. This group supported cancer patients in the form of an online webinar and support group. The participants are mostly late stage cancer patients and the feedback from participants was extremely successful. After Christine and Graeme worked tirelessly as volunteers for almost 2 years, in November of 2021, they decided to take a break from producing and leading the group in order to focus on Christine's desire to work as a patient advocate.
To learn more about CCASH, and see Christine (and Graeme) in action, check out this youtube video of Christine interviewing Pancreatic Cancer Patient Emma Sinclair who was told she had only weeks to live and who went on to be declared NED (no evidence of disease).