POCATech Fundraiser. Five Bucks Buys a Brick

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We need your help starting a new acupuncture school where working people can afford to go and learn how to be community acupunks in their own communities. Come into the clinic through the 22nd, “buy a brick”, and watch the school grow. (We’re building a symbolic leggo school at the clinic with initials of those who donate on each brick).

There is a common challenge that POCA clinics like us face as we get bigger and reach more people. A shortage of punks for growing and new clinics exists.  And there is an even bigger shortage of clinics in places where there are none.  Every week we get emails at pocacoop.com requesting clinics in places where there are none for hundreds or even thousands of miles.  The folks requesting these clinics know someone, a family member or friend, who has suggested community acupuncture, but because there are still so many places without clinics, there are still so many people who cannot access affordable acupuncture treatments. This is where POCA Tech comes in…with the help of POCA Coop. 

POCATech will be POCA Coop’s training institute.  We need affordable community acupuncture education as much as we need affordable acupuncture.  Because of the tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people now connected through our network of clinics, we know that POCA Tech is not just a dream, but something that we can make a reality if we can connect this next great idea with enough people.
We need to fundraise $125,000 to open POCA Tech’s doors.  In just 3 months we’ve raised almost 1/5 of that and we’re hoping that through our clinics we can raise at least another $25,000 by the end of the year… in $5 increments! That’s 5,000 donations of $5.  If just 200 of our 265 clinics, including us, are able to raise 25 $5 donations that would cover this next chunk of funds that we need.

And then let’s all of us imagine that a year from now POCA Tech’s first class, including, we’re hoping, at least a couple Rhode Islanders, will already have started school… and know that you have been a part of making that happen.


Here are answers to frequently asked questions about the project

1. What is POCA Tech
POCA Tech is a nonprofit educational corporation, 501(c)(3) status pending.
The POCA Technical Institute is the educational arm of the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture, a multi-stakeholder cooperative owned by patients, practitioners, clinics, and supporters of community acupuncture. POCA’s goal is to make acupuncture available and accessible to as many people as possible and to support those providing acupuncture to create stable and sustainable businesses and jobs. POCA Tech’s aim is to provide the cooperative with educational programs that back up its mission.
Its first goal is to create entry-level training programs for acupuncturists that are affordable to prospective students of ordinary incomes.
2. Why do we need POCA Tech?
We need POCA Tech for a few reasons:
a. Acupuncture school is crazy over-priced and most graduates leave school with $60-100K in debt. Fifty percent of acupuncture graduates are not practicing acupuncture after five years. Of those that are practicing, over 60% practice part-time. Most acupuncturist struggle to make a living. We need an affordable alternative that will attract a more diverse population of people and allow practitioners to graduate free of a debt burden.
b.POCA Tech will train people to be community acupuncturists. Community acupuncturists need a different skill set than private room acupuncturists, including highly efficient diagnostic and treatment skills, distal treatment techniques and deep commitments to social justice. Community acupuncture clinics need qualified practitioners and are having a hard time filling acupuncturist positions in their clinics.
3. How much will it cost to attend?
We are still in the planning process, but we plan for the cost to be around $5,800 per year for a period of three years. POCA Tech’s total program costs, including biomedical clinical science prerequisites but not including cost of living, should be about $25,000. POCA Tech will not be part of the student loan system.
4. Can’t POCA Tech apply for funds or big grants from somewhere else?
POCA Tech can once we gain our non-profit status. But POCA also recognizes that community involvement and investment is a key to successful community acupuncture clinics and will be a key to making POCA Tech successful. We need our community as much as our community needs us!
5. Where will POCA Tech be located?
POCA Tech will start in Portland, Oregon. The goal is to grow so that we can open more campuses in New England, the Midwest, and the South. POCA Tech will offer a schedule that allows students to work while in school and will not require relocation to the POCA Tech campus area.
6. You know how you said you love our community acupuncture clinic and that we have drastically changed your life for the better?
If you donate to POCA Tech, you will be helping to spread community acupuncture so more people can feel like you do.

Thank you so much.
And, don’t forget, we’ll be watching the documentary movie “Community Acupuncture: The Calmest Revolution Ever Staged” this Saturday at 2:30 at the clinic.
Photo: We're about to experience a transition here at PCA as one skilled and compassionate acupuncturist leaves us and another joins us. We are so grateful to have gotten to work with Ana Calla for the last year and a half. This is her last week with us. I'm sure she'd love to hear your appreciations and farewells. We will post a goodbye message from Ana on our website early next week. Much love to Ana.

Bittersweet transition. Goodbye to Ana and hello to Melissa

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Photo: We're about to experience a transition here at PCA as one skilled and compassionate acupuncturist leaves us and another joins us. We are so grateful to have gotten to work with Ana Calla for the last year and a half. This is her last week with us. I'm sure she'd love to hear your appreciations and farewells. We will post a goodbye message from Ana on our website early next week. Much love to Ana.

As many of you know, one of our practitioners, Ana Calla, worked 
her last day at PCA on Friday. 
The rest of us are so grateful to have 
been able to work with her for the last 
year and a half. Ana held such a warm and focused space for her patients and is a 
wonderful acupuncturist, speaking from experience.

Share appreciations or farewells on our facebook page if you’d like.

Ana says:

To all at PCA,
Working at PCA was a very enriching experience for me. Not only because I met wonderful people, but because it helped me to understand that a positive attitude is contagions and at the end it is all about caring for one another.
Hasta la vista amigos (so long my friends) with this a thought from Lao Tzu.
“If you are depressed,
you are living in the past.
If you are anxious,
you are living in the future.
If you are at peace,
you are living the present.”

And, last week, we posted this from our new acupuncturist, Melissa Tiernan.

Hello PCA community!

I’m so honored and thrilled to join the PCA team in serving the people of Rhode Island. Originally from Cranston, I left lil’ Rhody in 1984 to study for a B.A. in English literature and psychology from Middlebury College in Vermont. I headed west to New Mexico where I lived for 22 years having many adventures, most recently having founded and run a successful community acupuncture clinic there. I knew when I found community acupuncture during acupuncture school that I would never practice any other way. I believe that CA offers one of the best, most comprehensive systems for the treatment and prevention of all sorts of conditions and is one of the most fun ways to be of service to my community. 

In my spare time, I love hiking and exploring, discovering great books, food, and music, and being inspired by new ideas and progressive people. I am looking forward to meeting you and also finding out about all your favorite haunts for chowda, grindas and best beaches for body-surfing, which I plan to do every spare minute to make up for 22 years of living in a desert. Can’t wait to see you!




A hello from Melissa Tiernan, our new punk starting in December

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(We are so excited to have Melissa join us. She’s an experienced and compassionate community acupunk, and we just like her a lot.)

Hello PCA community!

I’m so honored and thrilled to join the PCA team in serving the people of Rhode Island. Originally from Cranston, I left lil’ Rhody in 1984 to study for a B.A. in English literature and psychology from Middlebury College in Vermont. I headed west to New Mexico where I lived for 22 years having many adventures, most recently having founded and run a successful community acupuncture clinic there. I knew when I found community acupuncture during acupuncture school that I would never practice any other way. I believe that CA offers one of the best, most comprehensive systems for the treatment and prevention of all sorts of conditions and is one of the most fun ways to be of service to my community. 

In my spare time, I love hiking and exploring, discovering great books, food, and music, and being inspired by new ideas and progressive people. I am looking forward to meeting you and also finding out about all your favorite haunts for chowda, grindas and best beaches for body-surfing, which I plan to do every spare minute to make up for 22 years of living in a desert. Can’t wait to see you!

Creating a sensible path to Punkdom.

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The last two weeks, we’ve written about the overwhelming demand for community acupuncture here in Rhody, across the U.S. and Canada, and other places in the world. More clinics are needed. More to the point, many more acupuncturist (punks) are needed to provide the treatments that are so in demand. (*By the way, the PCA team will be joined in early December by a fantastic new punk, a Rhode island native who started her own very successful community acupuncture clinic in the southwest. More about Melissa next week!!)

So, here’s one very important way we’re going to move affordable acupuncture forward, satisfying the demand, and creating more. Together, punks and patients, clinic founders and volunteers, and other interested stakeholders in affordable natural medicine are pioneering an acupuncture school that WON’T put its students in debt for the rest of their lives and WILL prepare them to do community acupuncture, to do simple, effective but affordable treatments that rely more on the needles and the patients’ own bodies/minds and less on some ancient secret wisdom or special powers of the punk.

POCATech is the next natural step in the progression of our movement to create a sustainable business model by which people with ordinary incomes can get regular acupuncture, and we acupuncturists can earn a living wage doing the work we love within our own beloved communities.

Community acupuncture, born in its present form in Portland Oregon through the labors of Lisa Rohleder and Skip Van Meter at Working Class Acupuncture, has grow steadily across the country and beyond, and revealed an almost limitless demand for what we’re offering. We created The Community Acupuncture Network which 1) freely shared the know-how and support to committed punks who refused to accept acupuncture as a luxury for the most wealthy, 2) spawned over 100 community acupuncture clinics, and 
3) organized those punks, owners, volunteers and patients into a  cooperative called POCA, which stands for The People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture.

Through POCA, our thinking has expanded to include patients, acupuncture students, other health care practitioners, clinic employees. Among and across all of these groups, there is unanimous and urgent support for the idea of creating our own school. Many of us started doing community acupuncture so that our own friends and family and neighbors could actually get regular acupuncture, and get the kind of acupuncture that works in their lives. It’s partly the same motivation that drives our vision of POCAtech. My 3 year old son, for example, is very interested in what I do, spends time playing “acupuncturist, loves to come in to the clinic and observe what’s happening. He recognizes it as loving, friendly, healing. It’s certainly conceivable for him to find himself wanting to be a punk. I want that to be a possibility. And, without POCAtech, it’s not.

Please ask us questions about POCATech, how we’re going to do it, and how our Rhode Island community will be key to the project. And, please be aware that PCA and Rhode Island will host the annual POCA Fest in the spring of 2013. You are warmly invited to spend a Saturday or all weekend with us. This event is about fun and inclusivity of all parts of our community. We’ll be talking coops, clowning, storytelling, envisioning dream clinics in dream locations, meeting each other over board games and good food. And, we’ll be moving POCATech closer to reality.