Tukwila Springs Update

a guest post by Jemila Hart

Art by A. Cohen

As a freshly minted POCA Tech graduate, it felt like a good time to provide an update on the extended pop-up clinic at Tukwila Springs, a project that I took on as a student that I am hoping will continue on beyond me. Tukwila Springs is a small transitional housing program in Gladstone for older adults who had previously been living outside and on the streets. On-site supportive services and property management are provided jointly by HomeForward and NARA (Native American Rehabilitation Association). The housing program is culturally specific with at least 10% of the housing units reserved for residents who are Indigenous.

In August, we completed seven months of twice-monthly student clinics. Funding for clinical supervision to keep the clinics going is now part of HomeForward’s annual budget. Twenty-seven of forty-nine residents living there have gotten treatments. We see an average of 5-6 people each time we show up and have provided a total of 77 treatments overall.

In Acupuncture Points are Holes (Rohleder, 2017) Lisa wrote about an I Ching hexagram, the Well, that she drew that spoke to her fate as a pioneer of community acupuncture. Attempting to build a well that fits the needs of the community at Tukwila Springs is what this project has felt like to me. From the beginning, I was curious as to whether a well could be built in the first place, and whether once it was dug if the people who lived there would be up for drinking from it. I have wondered if they would find it thirst quenching and perhaps preferable to tap water or bottled water they might already be drinking and whether they would find it satisfying enough to return to drink from it again and again.

Art by A. Cohen

I have worked coordinating social services in housing programs for decades and know that getting people to engage in anything in their neighborhoods is not easy and this would be the case for these pop clinics too. It requires more than a flier and good intentions to get people to try something new and to convince them that the stress involved with engaging with other people will be worth it. One thing I knew would be important to gain momentum was to show up consistently enough for people to know that we were invested in being there. The consistency is a way of building trust that acupuncture will be around long enough at Tukwilla that it is worth the investment of people’s time and energy to come.

I have thought a lot about the programs embraced by the housing communities I worked in. One that always came to mind was a foot care clinic staffed by a retired nurse named Betty that took place on a monthly basis in the basement of one of our public housing high rises. Betty’s on-site services had started with a health and wellness grant, but once funding ended, residents who lived there continued to pay her out of pocket to come and took the coordination and outreach for it into their own hands. The way the group worked reminded me of community acupuncture; the foot care was a critical service for the many people in the building who lived with diabetes. The nurse moved from one resident to the next as they sat in a circle. It was fun and social. It was a humble thing, but for the people who came, it meant a lot, kept them healthy and continued on for years.

Coming two Saturdays a month, we are dipping in and out of day-to-day life at Tukwila Springs. Every time we are there, it is a different scene. The relationship between our pop-up clinic and the perspectives of people there about acupuncture continues to evolve. Tukwila is unique community in that everyone who lives there has a shared history of trauma and alienation from having been homeless for long periods of time. People’s stories are tough; living in the woods until the Estacada fires, in storage units, under freeways, in their car.

When we first started in February, residents let us know that a morning clinic wasn’t ideal. “We are night people here”, one resident said. “We sleep during the day, because outside on the streets, it wasn’t safe to sleep at night.” We weren’t able to offer another time, but it is apparent that people need a lot of prompting and reminders there if we are going to be on-site at that early hour. This has lead me to spend a considerable portion of each shift knocking on doors. This was ok to do, residents informed me, but I was going to have to create a signature knock as my “cop knock” was seriously traumatizing to people, especially first thing in the morning.

People have responded to acupuncture there within the range that I have come to expect and that we talked a lot about at POCA Tech. There are definitely our regulars who show up every time, almost without fail. A couple of residents including a self-appointed “mayor” of Tukwila make a considerable effort to convince their neighbors to come so we can make our “quota” of five that the organization asked us to maintain to keep the project going. For those who have come once or twice, it’s no longer a conversation about why they should give it a try, but instead about treatment planning and how to use acupuncture as a tool to manage your own health.

For those who are adamantly not interested it is often about the needles and a history with intravenous drug use. Others who are clear “nos” to acupuncture include someone who felt that acupuncture was a voodoo ritual and another had heard that if you got acupuncture, you wouldn’t be allowed to donate plasma. So, as in the world outside Tukwila, people have lots of ideas about what acupuncture is all about and how they want to use it.

I don’t know for sure how long this will go at Tukwila Springs and there is no guarantee that the people who live there will continue to show up for treatments. Being there reminds me that showing up for a treatment can be an act of radical self-care. You care enough about yourself to put yourself in the chair. It is also act of faith, faith that acupuncture and the person providing it will be able to provide you some relief. I remain grateful just to be able to be there every month, offering up acupuncture to the community and seeing what happens.