Community Acupuncture Network board meeting

Ellen an I traveled to Portland last week with my wife Amy for the board meeting of the Community Acupuncture Network, or CAN. It took place at the mothership, Working Class Acupuncture in Cully.
The board is working on a lot of things related to figuring out how to create affordable acupuncture, how to get acupuncturists out of theory land and get related to the people in their communities, and how to get more non-acupunks leading CAN. If you're interested in any of the business of the board, check out these articles on CAN's blog.
General description of meeting and members.
A new manifesto for emphasizing the "community": in community acupuncture.
Critique"integrative medicine" vis-a-vis acupuncture.

But, mostly our visit was just tons of fun being around a lot of great people who are really serious about our small part of the revolution, and serious about having fun.

Rebecca Parker: new acupunk at Philly Community Acupuncture !

We are so so pleased to introduce Rebecca Parker. She is a delight, as a person and a practitioner. (I actually just got a treatment from her, and am feeling like a million bucks.) She has already been seeing patients for two weeks, working every Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. Ellen and I dreamed about Rebecca working with us when she finished her studies. And, it happened!

Rebecca wrote the following to introduce herself.

Working at the Firehouse is like coming home for me. Before my life as an acupuncturist, I was a bicycle mechanic. I worked toward the health of my community as a wrench at Firehouse bikes, and facilitator at the Bike Church bike coop. I started hanging out on Baltimore Avenue over a decade ago, and came back to visit periodically while away at acupuncture school. This neighborhood is a unique place where passion, creativity and community sensibility mix, and I’m thrilled to serve as a neighborhood acupuncturist here. As a practitioner, I think of myself as a facilitator who guides the acupuncture recipient through the process of rediscovering their own resources. As my teacher used to say, we just direct traffic, it’s the patient who is driving the car.

One of the things I love about PCA is that it’s a place that encourages people to take responsibility for their own health, empowering the patient as much as possible. People are given types of agency over their care that they don’t get in places where they are told exactly how much to pay, taken to exactly the treatment bed that the practitioner designates for them, and told how long their treatment will last. Here the patient is encouraged to pay attention to their body, because through this relationship comes the information needed to be healthy. I love acupuncture because it reminds my body of what it could feel like. It moves my stuckness, and sticks my moveness. I love it because it’s a simple, safe, cheap, effective medicine. With Big Pharma and Big Insurance making healthcare less and less accessible, it’s really important that we have ways of reducing our reliance on these sometimes unavoidable monstrosities.

So big thanks and gratitude are due to the amazing Korben and Ellen who turned this space, that was once a dumping ground for old bike frames and a tangle of wheels, forks, and banana seats, into a peaceful sanctuary for group nap-time. Much gratitude to my current and future patients, who teach me so much about human resiliency, and to all my teachers who shared their wisdom with me. And finally, much gratitude to West Philadelphia.

Pay-what-you-want fundraiser for Studio 34

Experimental performers The Missoula Oblongata present "The Last Hurrah of the Clementines" as a fundraiser for neighborhood art/yoga space Studio 34. Check Puppet Uprising's website for details.

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.