Community Acupuncture School in Progress, Part Two

We moved in! (mostly)

We did it, we moved! With not a minute to spare. Portland’s having a heat wave and our previous classroom is on the second floor, with no air conditioning. We would’ve had to reschedule the whole module this weekend. Instead, Cohort 10 will have class in our new space. It’s still in process but I wanted to show you.

This is what the school looks like if you walk in the front door and turn to the right:

That’s our little lounge area, which will do double duty as our waiting room when we’re having student clinic. The light is perfect for plants (bright, indirect) so we have lots.

If you turn slightly to the left, you’ll see our new giant whiteboard on the wall where it belongs (as opposed to my front porch):

Our skeleton has sadly lost its head. We’re hoping a helpful student wants to try to put it back on. Good thing we’re not going to be moving again for at least ten years, because our skeleton has had enough of moving.

Going further into the space, here’s the white board from another angle. It’s so big! We can write so much more on it!

And here’s the view from the far end of the classroom space, looking toward the front door. We can fit a class of 20 people in here, no problem.

If you turn and look towards the back of the space, you’ll see our clinic area. The new chair covers had a misadventure and haven’t arrived yet, so we’ll have to use sheets this weekend to cover the chairs for needling practice.

It’s lovely to be able to walk around without bumping into anything; our previous space was such a tight squeeze. We won’t have to move much furniture, if any, to convert from classroom to clinic — which we weren’t sure about even last week. So that’s great.

And if you turn to the right, you’ll see our little library, just on the other side of the handwashing sink. We’re still unpacking books.

But we’ve made huge progress since about a week ago, when it looked like this (that’s Nancy of Cohort 9 cheerfully tackling a mountain of boxes):

And behind the library, there’s our kitchen/break room, which still needs a lot of things, including knobs on the cabinet doors. Also a microwave. (Anybody have a microwave they’d like to donate?) But it’s approximately ten times bigger than our previous kitchen.

As you can see there’s still plenty to do: we haven’t hung up any posters or other art, and one major downside of the space is that there aren’t any closets, so there’s nowhere to put things away. We’ll have to get some big locking cabinets. There’s some stuff in our old classroom that we haven’t moved yet because we’ve got no place to put it.

But we have everything we need to hold class this weekend (did I mention the air conditioning?) and overall the relief is overwhelming. We have room to move around and room to grow. We’ve never really had our own space and it feels amazing. It’s like a whole new world here on NE 42nd Ave.

Stay tuned for updates — we’ll be having an open house/party (another thing we’ve never been able to do before) and once we get a little more settled we’ll figure out when we can start holding student clinics here. Thank you to everyone who helped with the move — you know who you are and we appreciate you enormously.