Community Acupuncture and "Social Business"

The Integrator Blog, edited by John Weeks, presents "news, reports, opinion, and networking for the business, education, policy and practice of Intagrative Medicine and CAM." Weeks wrote an article last week about community acupuncture and the "social business" model, as defined by Mohammed Yunis.
Read the whole article here.
It quotes Community Acupuncture founder Lisa Rohleder as saying "A social business is not a 'socially responsible business' and it is not a nonprofit. It functions completely differently. The structure of a socially-responsible business is to make a profit and then use the money for good. The structure of a nonprofit is to subsidize doing good with money that has been made some other way. The structure of a 'social business' is not to make a profit at all, but to create 'social dividends.' If a social business does make a profit, it reinvests that profit immediately into itself rather than pulling it out and giving it to its owners or shareholders or to some separate nonprofit (as a 'socially responsible business' would do).
She goes on to say that the social business model "is just to exist and do its thing without either depending on subsidies or making extra money beyond what it needs to meet its social goals." Instead, WCA's social goals are "to create jobs for acupuncturists and to provide acupuncture to people with ordinary incomes."

Urban Sustainability Series

From natural building to seed saving to herbal tinctures, most of the series hosted by the Jewish Farm School will take place in West Philly. Here's the schedule.

Here's the "Marketplace" piece

Here's a link to the piece on community acupuncture by local Philly journalist, Joel Rose.

PCA on National Public Radio this week

NPR's "Marketplace" is running a story on us this week or next. How crazy is that? We'd love to give you a heads up, but, they're not sure when it's going to run. We'll let everyone know as soon as we know.

Citypaper article

From local writer, Andrew Zitcer. Read it here.

Free acupuncture for Veterans in Philly?

Acupuncturists across the nation are volunteering their time and skills to make free regular treatments available to returned and returning vets. http://www.acuwithoutborders.org/veteransprogram.php

We'd like to start such a program here. Are you interested in helping? We need volunteers for various jobs to get it going and keep it going.

Contact Korben Perry

Ellen in the news

A big photo of acupuncturist Ellen Vincent graces page 76 of the new Utne Reader. Actually, it's almost the same photo as the one below. It's a good article about the Community Acupuncture movement. Even though the cover of the magazine makes it look like a fast food trade magazine, we're still proud and delighted about it. I'll link to it if they put the article on line. Actually, here's the article as it first appeared in Yes Magazine.

Also, Ellen was recently the recipient of the Trailblazer Award for women owned business in Philadelphia. Here's a Philadelphia Tribune article about the awards.

Check back soon for another soon-to-be-published article about Philadelphia Acupuncture.