Dinosaurs in the Park
in honor of CareOregon's Day of Impact
It was a beautiful October day so I decided to go for a walk in Mount Tabor Park. And there were dinosaurs.
Seriously, I parked my car in the little lot near the Visitor Center, got out to start my walk and then stood still on the sidewalk because there were three dinosaurs wandering around the playground across the street. So — as one does in the year 2023 — I took a picture. And then a couple more, as they wandered on down the hill.
It was a Portland moment.
I’ve lived in Portland since 1989, and I have yet to get used to how lovely it is here, or how full of improbable (and great) combinations. This post is actually about one of those combinations: WCA’s longstanding partnership with CareOregon. Just like you wouldn’t expect to find dinosaurs in a park, you probably wouldn’t expect to find a small acupuncture nonprofit with a punk-rock attitude in partnership with a giant public insurance company.
But WCA doesn’t bill insurance, you might say. So how does that relationship work?
Let’s start with WHY it works: shared purpose, commitment to relationship-building, flexibility, and most of all an openness to what our community needs — on both sides.
For a lot of WCA’s patients, discovering community acupuncture is like finding dinosaurs in the park: it’s a jolt out of the ordinary. This is a good thing, especially if your “ordinary” is shadowed by chronic pain, stress, and anxiety. And it’s not just that acupuncture itself is out of the ordinary, or that relaxing deeply in a room with other people is a dreamy experience, it’s that WCA operates so differently from the rest of the healthcare system.
Over the course of a couple of decades, we’ve been able to get WCA into a position to provide unlimited amounts of acupuncture for almost anybody who wants it. It’s rare and surprising to find unlimited access to anything in healthcare, especially if your personal resources are limited — but unlimited access can be crucial in addressing chronic conditions, particularly chronic pain. WCA is able to be flexible with our patients in ways that most other providers can’t. Of course we can only do that because of the support of our community, including partners like CareOregon. And CareOregon has been flexible with WCA in ways we never expected. Patients have told us that WCA’s flexibility makes them feel welcome in our clinics. For WCA, CareOregon’s flexibility has made us feel welcome in the larger public health community in Portland.
Our partnership started in 2012, with a few caseworkers and a few clients from Care Oregon’s program for high utilizers of the healthcare system (now called Regional Care Teams). They reached out to us, and then they introduced us to the principles of trauma-informed care, and we’ll be grateful to them forever. This relationship helped us see why what we do at WCA matters to people who are otherwise marginalized in the healthcare system, especially people dealing with chronic pain. Acupuncture is a tough business and WCA needs those positive reminders like we need oxygen.
The ongoing impact of our referral program with CareOregon has been that WCA is able to reach hundreds of patients who can benefit from community acupuncture, patients who often become long-term valued regulars in our clinics, whom we otherwise wouldn’t be able to serve. Sometimes the people who benefit from acupuncture the most are also the least able to pay for it, even on a sliding scale. Being able to offer meaningful clinical results to the people who need it is what gets us up in the morning — it never stops being motivating to provide real relief to someone who is at the end of their rope.
CareOregon has also supported WCA through its Community Giving grants. In 2022, they gave us a grant that supported the preparations for our fourth clinic, by funding a series of pop-up clinics in the coffee shop that would become WCA North. But it was CareOregon’s Community Giving event sponsorship in 2023 that was a full-fledged dinosaurs-in-the-park surprise.
In order to create a future for WCA, we had to make our own accredited acupuncture school — which comes with a truly daunting amount of bureaucracy. A particular hurdle for us is the re-accreditation process. This time last year we reached out to our community with a somewhat desperate appeal to help us raise the funds to cover the $35,000+ price tag of our 2022-2023 re-accreditation cycle, which included a financial audit and various fees, plus a site visit. A requirement of the site visit is that we pay for the travel and lodging costs of the four site visitors who come to our school for four days to rummage through all our operations. As we were contemplating our mounting bills for airfare, it occurred to me that the site visit was an event — an involuntary event, but an event nonetheless. I thought, I wonder if CareOregon would sponsor it?
THEY DID.
We received a Community Giving grant for the site visitors’ travel and lodging costs, which ended up costing about $5000, a heavy lift for our little school. I am pretty sure that in the history of acupuncture school accreditation nothing like this has ever happened before. It was a beautiful example of CareOregon’s flexibility and creativity in a moment of need.
Our acupuncture school is the only one that prioritizes trauma-informed care and teaches future acupuncturists to prioritize the needs of marginalized people. Our student clinics provide about 6,000 acupuncture treatments per year, many of them to CareOregon members referred to us. If we weren’t accredited, all of that would go away.
In September we learned that our acupuncture school was re-accredited for the maximum period of seven years. Reaching that milestone with CareOregon’s support truly lifted our hearts. It was a Portland moment. It was like dinosaurs in the park on a sunny day.
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