Some of our sister POCA clinics around the country have been discussing coops too. One of our comrades, John Vella from Working Class Acupuncture in Portland, was talking with Eric Bowman of Northwest Cooperative Development Center. John's words describe some of how it feels for us at PCA to get to work with all of you:
The relationships that cooperatives foster tends to be fundamentally built upon a genuine intention to do what works for everyone involved and related to a project. This flies in the face of how much of current society seems to think we should work.. . . . . .most people really do want to engage their lives from a more heart-felt approach... when we take the risk to approach the relationships of an enterprise from the heart of sincerity we are so often surprised at the genuine response it elicits. -John Vella (More of this discussion here.)
Providence Community Acupuncture, is a social business and member of The People' Organization of Community Acupuncture (POCA), the multistakeholder cooperative "designed to build a long-term stable economic relationship based on fair treatment for everyone." For the next month, PCA along with around 250 other member clinics around the country and beyond, will be reaching out to you, our community, to encourage all of YOU to become members of POCA.
POCA's goals are:
To make community acupuncture as widely available as possible.
To establish affordable acupuncture training and continuing education programs.
To establish best practices for the operation of sustainable community acupuncture clinics.
To create job stability for community acupuncture employees, staff, and clinic owners.
To build healthy relationships and foster collaboration among our practitioners, staff, patients, and communities.
You can join POCA by signing up in the clinic on our computer from March 5th to April 5th. Or in the meantime, feel free to go right over and sign up at the POCA home page by clicking on this link. You'll be helping to make the goals above happen, and you'll be strengthening these relationships that "tend to be fundamentally built upon a genuine intention to do what works for everyone involved and related to a project." We've been imagining that by all of us working together at existing clinics, we'll be able to bring about many more new clinics for communities that don't yet have them. Please join us.
