Social Entrepreneurship at POCA Tech
and how we're trying to teach it
As promised, this is a post about entrepreneurship for acupuncturists. It’s something we talk about a lot at POCA Tech, because it’s a topic that requires a lot of unpacking. Many people (maybe most people?) find entrepreneurship intimidating. Which is a problem for us, because entrepreneurship for acupuncturists is pretty much a requirement rather than an option.
The big question is how to teach it.
Some people believe that entrepreneurship can’t be taught; you either have the capacities and the desire or you don’t. Since POCA Tech approaches acupuncture as a set of skills that students can learn, practice and get better at, and since acupuncturists usually have to be entrepreneurs, we choose to believe that entrepreneurship can be taught — or it’s something that we can help students cultivate for themselves — or, as we say to new patients about acupuncture itself, it’s at least worth a try.
In a recent module at POCA Tech, I asked Cohort 10 (our second year students) to tell me what entrepreneurship meant to them. We made a list on the whiteboard and it was all over the place! On the positive side, entrepreneurship meant autonomy, creativity and joy, while on the negative side, it meant loneliness, weariness, and a high risk of failure. Students’ images of entrepreneurship spanned a range of examples from “bad-ass artists with positive self-value” through “confident go-getters” all the way to “sleazy, exploitative con artists”.
Part of my goal with the unpacking was to make the point that entrepreneurship, with all its associated skills, attitudes and challenges, isn’t only about money. Lately I’ve been thinking about that distinction: entrepreneurship that involves money vs entrepreneurship that doesn’t. Having access to lots of money doesn’t necessarily make you a good entrepreneur. However, being a good entrepreneur can impact your life in positive ways that go far beyond money (regardless of how much of it you make). I became an entrepreneur out of necessity1; I didn’t expect to like it, to be good at it, or to have it be good for me. But entrepreneurship turned out to be a kind of organizing principle for my life — even beyond making my living — so I want to see if it’s possible to transmit those benefits to POCA Tech students. I would have felt more prepared to be an acupuncturist if my school had tried to prepare me for being an entrepreneur.
After we made our list on the whiteboard, we talked about this definition of a social entrepreneur:
Entrepreneurship can be about identifying a gap — a need — in one’s community and then building something to fill that need. That usually involves money, but not necessarily.
Community acupuncture qualifies as a form of social entrepreneurship for a number of reasons. One, it’s designed for people who slip through the cracks of conventional healthcare. Two, it offers acupuncture to the community in ways that reflect how a lot of people want to use it, as opposed to how the healthcare industrial complex and its gatekeepers think they should use it. Three, community acupuncture addresses the gap between the acupuncture profession’s aspirations and how things have actually turned out economically for acupuncturists. There’s not a lot of money in it; most of us are doing it for love; why not do it in a way that maximizes the love as opposed to the insurance reimbursement?
For all these reasons, I think it’s helpful for POCA Tech students to imagine themselves as social entrepreneurs in training.
As most of you know, I’m pragmatic. I like concrete examples. And so we couldn’t have a class on entrepreneurship without unpacking some samples from the WCA/POCA Tech world — and one of them was this Substack.
In an earlier post I wrote about how back in 2022, WCA engaged in a coaching process with social impact consultant Camille Trummer. That was an entrepreneurial impulse — we recognized both a need and an opportunity for WCA to develop community partnerships, so we invested some of our time, energy and pandemic rescue funding into getting some expert help with that effort. As we were talking with Camille about how creating community partnerships also created increased requirements for communication (both internal and external), I realized that we needed a newsletter. The problem was that everybody’s job descriptions at WCA were already overflowing. How could we add more work?
What happened next, though, was an example of why I love entrepreneurship, particularly the kind that’s not necessarily about money. Since I enjoy writing I let myself entertain the idea of a newsletter: what if it were possible? Using Substack was Skip’s idea, and when I investigated the platform I was surprised by how easy it was to navigate. I made some drafts and Camille looked them over and gave her approval, and then we were off and running.
Much to my surprise, instead of being a burdensome extra task, writing this Substack actually made my job easier and more coherent. A big problem with Executive Director jobs is that they can feel simultaneously amorphous AND like an overflowing kitchen sink; it’s easy to feel like you’re doing everything and nothing, to nobody’s satisfaction. This Substack helps me think through what I’m working on and also let other people in on it. And as my co-director Sonya said recently, it helps people understand the challenges that WCA and POCA Tech are up against.
When an entrepreneurial effort succeeds, it not only fills a gap but it takes on a life of its own and thrives in the gap. It becomes more than the sum of its parts. It starts to generate resources instead of just consuming them — and not just monetary resources, all kinds of resources.
This newsletter has helped me build relationships and connections with all kinds of people I never would’ve met otherwise (hi!). It attracted A. Cohen’s art (which has developed its own fan base). And even though creating the newsletter wasn’t about money, paid subscribers are contributing about $3,000 a year to WCA’s bottom line. Which is a meaningful amount and we appreciate it enormously!
I don’t know how you could convey the generative, magical qualities of entrepreneurship without showing living examples — and without offering students concrete ways to participate in the process. 2
Which gets us back to our 25 X 1000 exercise.
In class we talked about how the numbers in the exercise mirror the contours of growing a practice. Back in 2002, I had maybe 30 regular or semi-regular patients in my tiny private practice, people who had loyally followed me all over town from one rented space to another, and finally to the fledgling version of WCA — which translated to maybe 15 treatments a week for me. In the 25 X 1000 exercise, the assignment is for each student to ask 30 potential donors for $25 each. As I was working through my list of people to ask (thank you to everyone who donated and helped me walk my talk on this!) it viscerally reminded me of my patient base circa 2002: a little group of people I was leaning on.
I said to the students, “Scroll through the shared spreadsheet. When you do that, you can get a better sense of how many people 1,000 really is. There’s no way we can get to 1,000 unless we all work at this.” WCA was only able to make the leap from 30 people to 1,000 because of how much word-of-mouth support our patients gave us. The difference between 30 people and 1,000 in this exercise represents all the ways that growing a practice is a collaborative exercise, and how much you need other people’s help. It represents the difference between what a practitioner can do on their own and what a community can do for them.
One of the overlooked facets of entrepreneurship in this culture is the value of growing a network for your business. As my co-director Jersey said, “There’s this myth that a successful entrepreneur is a successful individual — they did it all by themselves! Which isn’t true, there’s always a network involved somehow, somewhere, even if it’s invisible.” Our shared spreadsheet helps make the network visible.
The process of reaching out to people and asking for help can be daunting, though, which is why it’s valuable to practice the skill of asking. Or as Tiffany of Cohort 8 said:
I've realized that fundraising/"asking" for support in the form of money is uncomfortable for me most of the time. BUT when you wholeheartedly believe in something like community acupuncture, POCA Tech, and accessible healing for as many as possible, hearing the word "No" to your "ask" just seems like a blip, a curve in the road that you just move along and go about your journey of asking more people. Hearing "No" used to be this big scary thing to me...like I failed to convince someone of how important this is. But why focus on that when I could be using that energy towards people who are interested? When people say "No" to your ask right off the bat it’s actually doing you a favor because you don't waste energy trying to convince them of anything. And then you realize, or I did, that it leaves even more room for people who are interested and won't need convincing that your "ask" is worth their time. A reframe or redirect to where your energy is best served without it feeling personal. Letting go of the outcome helps you see things you might not have before. Like all the "Yes's" out there waiting for a connection to something worth believing in!
Now I'm more curious than fearful...instead of what if it doesn't work out (which sometimes it still creeps in), I say well what if it does work out? Or if this doesn't work out what door will it open? How many? What will each look like? The curiosity helps me acknowledge the fear and use it to my advantage.
That’s exactly the entrepreneurial mindset we want to cultivate at POCA Tech.
My hope for the 25 X 1000 exercise is that it will turn into something that’s more than the sum of its parts. By my count, as of today we’ve collectively asked about 270 people to donate (or 27% of our asking goal) and we’ve raised about $5500 (or about 22% of our fundraising goal). The smallest donation has been $5 and the largest has been $500. Also, we’ve added 10 new Sustainers — these are the recurring donors who help us keep the lights on and we can’t say enough about how important they are. We’re making progress, one ask at a time.
One thing I love about this exercise is that it’s already clear that it’s not the kind of fundraiser where someone puts up a GoFundMe link and crosses their fingers and hopes. This requires active engagement. It’s only going to work if everybody who needs to ask actually does it. And the funds will most likely grow incrementally — exactly the way an acupuncture practice grows. There’s no magic bullet, there’s just persistence.
So thank you to everyone who has listened to our “asks” and to everyone who has so generously supported POCA Tech by making a donation!
And for those who haven’t — if you’re getting anything out of this newsletter, or you’re encouraged in any way by POCA Tech’s efforts to re-imagine acupuncture education, will you donate $25?
Here’s the link to donate and the QR code:
That’s actually a term: “necessity entrepreneur”. It means someone who starts a business because it’s their best option for financial stability. Many women, immigrants, and people with histories of incarceration — or other difficulties with conventional employment — fall into this category.