Poca Technical Institute

We’re the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture and we believe that everybody who wants acupuncture should be able to get it.

We also believe that’s up to us, because it’s unlikely that insurance companies or the government are going to make it happen. Call us old-fashioned but we think that profit and healthcare are a bad combination.  That’s why we created a cooperative for patients and acupuncturists to work together to make acupuncture affordable and accessible.

Before we came along, the going rate for acupuncture treatments was anywhere from $75 to $300 a treatment -- and to get good results, most people need more than one treatment.  Acupuncture can often provide a much better quality of life to people with chronic illnesses and chronic pain, but this requires ongoing treatment, more than almost any insurance company will cover. POCA clinics use sliding scales of $15 to $50 per treatment (with the low end being no higher than $20).

In 2012 our co-op gave over 750,000 affordable treatments in the US and Canada, mostly to people who otherwise would not be getting acupuncture. (We’re still counting last year’s numbers, but so far it looks like we did more than that in 2013.) We have also provided three microloans to open new clinics in underserved areas. Please check out our co-op website at pocacoop.com.

POCA is busier and more successful than we ever dreamed, but we have just one serious problem: hiring acupuncturists to work for us.

Although we have figured out how to make acupuncture treatment affordable, acupuncture education is still much too expensive. Acupuncture school tuition alone costs students anywhere from $42,000 at the low end to over $100,000 at the high end. Since most programs don’t allow students to work while they’re in school, tuition is only part of the cost; students have to take out loans to cover living expenses as well. One acupuncture school reported that their students’ average student loan debt upon graduation was almost $90,000. This means that in order to become an acupuncturist, most people have to take out loans that they will probably never repay.

POCA clinics are growing and need to hire new acupuncturists, but they struggle to fill these positions. Because of their student loans, many acupuncturists feel that they need to charge as much as possible for their services, and so they don’t want to treat ordinary people with ordinary incomes; they only want to treat wealthy people. Furthermore, acupuncture schools don’t teach students how to work in busy community clinics that serve diverse communities of patients. POCA clinics want to be able to recruit their future acupuncturists from those diverse communities that they already serve.

The only solution is for POCA to open its own affordable acupuncture school: the POCA Technical Institute. We’re almost ready to do that. We have a curriculum; we have a business plan; we have applied for and are waiting to receive our license to operate as a private career school in the state of Oregon. We expect the total cost of the POCA Tech program to be under $25,000 for three years of training, and students should be able to work throughout.There’s just one more step in the process before we can start classes in September of 2014.

Our graduates will have jobs waiting for them, but in order to accept those jobs, they need to become licensed. In almost all states, getting an acupuncture license requires graduating from an accredited school. So we have to make sure our school can get accredited.

We designed our program carefully to meet accreditation standards, but going through the accreditation process costs money: we estimate about $60,000 from start to finish. In addition, accreditation requires that we have a tuition reserve fund of about $15,000. Most schools pass the cost of accreditation on to their students, but we don’t want to do that.

POCA has already raised over $68,000, mostly from our members. We expect to use those funds for concrete start-up expenses like furniture, rent, and educational software. POCA is used to bootstrapping our projects and we’ve raised enough money to bootstrap our school into existence. What we don’t have yet, though, are the funds to ensure we can get accredited.

This is our last fundraising push before we open our doors. With 750,000+ treatments a year, we know that there are a lot of people out there who support community acupuncture. If a lot of us can make even a small donation, we will fund POCA Tech’s accreditation in no time. Please consider a tax-deductible contribution to POCA Tech. It’s the future of affordable community acupuncture.