Wayfinding Part Three: Creating a Pop-up Clinic with a Partner Organization
a guest post by Jemila Hart, third year POCA Tech student
When I applied at POCA Tech, I had this seed of an idea: I wanted to see what it could look like to integrate community acupuncture into low-income transitional and affordable housing neighborhoods. I had worked in these neighborhoods for over two decades and it made sense to me for many reasons.
Low-income housing neighborhoods tend to be dynamic, collaborative and often very stressful places to live. If you live in one of these neighborhoods, chances are that you are managing a chronic health condition. You and your neighbors are likely to have experienced a significant period of homelessness or other extremely traumatic experience and struggle with your mental health. There is a regular police presence on your street and you spend a lot of time navigating the daunting and often scary bureaucracies that comes with living in poverty and receiving any kind of public benefits. In short, in these communities, there are lots and lot of people who could really benefit from regular access to acupuncture!
Low-income housing is also a good fit for on-site community acupuncture because they are places where you see real community happening. With most residents living on very limited incomes, few can afford the independence and isolation that having money buys. Neighbors often come to depend on each other: giving each other rides to get to the grocery store, watching out for each other’s kids and being caregivers in a myriad of ways to vulnerable people in the neighborhood. These neighborhoods also tend to have dedicated community buildings and community spaces perfect for a pop-up or mobile clinic. And in 2020, with the passage of the 26-210 Supportive Services Metro Bond Measure, there is also a tax base for funding of supportive services to help transition people off the streets and for “eviction prevention” support to help people stay stably housed. This is a new era where, for once, funding for supportive services is abundant and finding financial support for something like community acupuncture in housing seems very possible.
Despite how good a fit the integration of Community Acupuncture into housing has been in my mind, actually getting something going has been, as Lisa has written about, an experience of “wayfinding”. In the last couple of years I made a number of attempts to tap into connections that just didn’t work out.
One night recently I went to dinner with a couple of old friends and we got to talking about this. My friend Kevin had recently started working at the Native American Rehabilitation Association (NARA) and NARA in partnership with Home Forward were providing supportive services at Tukwila Springs, a newly remodeled 49-unit SRO style apartment complex dedicated to providing housing for older adults who were transitioning off the streets. Kevin said that if I wanted to do some pop-ups at Tukwila he could help and asked me to send him a proposal that he could present to leadership. “Of course,” I said, and made the case for why Community Acupuncture was a good fit for the people they served at Tukwila Springs.
To move this forward with POCA Tech, I connected with Sara Biegelsen, who had managed to manifest WCA’s new North clinic into reality. I asked her what she thought about this project. She was supportive but her advice was to “find the money first.” Sara said it didn’t have to be a lot of money, just enough to cover the cost of having a clinic supervisor on site. I returned to my friend Kevin, whose supervisor had responded positively to the original proposal, and said that to actually make this happen, we needed a budget, $150/per pop-up specifically, to cover costs for POCA Tech. Kevin said he would present a second proposal along with the new proposed budget. How many pop-ups did I think would be sufficient? “Acupuncture is most effective when you can get it regularly,” I responded, “and I would love to see them happen weekly for at least a month, in addition to whatever period of time that Home Forward/NARA would be willing to pay for.”
Kevin sent me a text that Home Forward/NARA had approved a budget for four pop-up clinics and that his bosses had said that if least five residents attended each clinic, they would consider continuing to fund pop-up clinics on a monthly basis. I connected with Whitsitt to see what could work for his schedule, connected with Sonya to learn how to access the mobile clinic supplies, connected with Emery and Jersey to understand what was needed to invoice NARA/ Home Forward for clinical supervision, and connected with Andrew, Jen and Tiffany about staffing the pop-ups with me.
Kevin invited me to a staff meeting at Tukwila Springs to talk about the project. At that meeting, I was able to connect with staff about their experiences with acupuncture, hear about who lived there, what it was like to work there and what they thought would work best to engage the people there on a Saturday. They showed me the Wellness Room where the pop-ups would take place and the Property Manager arranged for me to pick up a FOB to access the building. Based on what I heard in that meeting, I drafted some fliers and emailed clinic paperwork that I thought staff could use to talk about acupuncture and the upcoming clinics with residents.
By far my biggest fear was that we would do all this and no one would show up at the Saturday morning pop-ups. These fears were realistic: from all my years in housing I know how difficult it can be getting people to engage. Why people invest their time and energy in trying something new is complicated. Usually people come to things because they had some positive interaction with you at some point and you personally invited them. There is an art and alchemy to it and I knew that I would need to do a lot of outreach just walking the halls of Tukwila Springs talking to people about acupuncture in order to build enough trust for people to come. Interestingly, the 5NP pop-up at the Capitol was happening at the same time that we started doing the pop-ups at Tukwila Springs. I was glad I attended because I learned a lot from Noni and Maddie’s approach to convincing legislators and their staff to try 5NP to reduce their Short Session stress, and I applied it at Tukwila Springs.
I think that this pro-active approach to outreach was essential to the success of the pop-ups at Tukwila. As of Saturday, we wrapped up the fourth pop-up clinic. Between five and seven residents and staff attended each session and momentum continues to build. Kevin and another staff are advocating for a budget that would support us coming twice a month. One resident has taken on the role of outreach coordinator asking at every clinic whether we reached our “five resident quota” so the project can continue. As I started talking to people about WCA clinics they could access between pop-ups, a resident said that she was going to try and organize a carpool to get her neighbors “who really needed it” to Rockwood. People have also started to provide some feedback about how what we’re offering could work better for the community there. “We’re all night people here,” one resident said. “All of us were living on the streets at one point and it’s just not safe to sleep at night. Because we are used to being up all night, many more people would come to get acupuncture if it started a little later? Can it start a little later?”
It has been a rewarding experience putting together this extended pop-up at Tukwila Springs. My key take-aways from it thus far have been first, your relationships matter — both for building a happy life and because, in this case, my friendship with Kevin opened up an opportunity to make these pop-up clinics happen.
Money also matters. If we had just offered to do a pop-up clinic for free, I don’t think we would have seen the level of engagement with the organization or with the residents that we have had. An organization allocating resources to a project is a signal of their investment in a partnership and respect that what is being offered has value. It was also important to me to build a relationship that could be sustainable for WCA and POCA Tech.
Finally, I learned that getting a pop-up to happen with a community organization requires a lot of pro-active communication and attention to detail. Lots of things could have derailed this project from happening. In order to keep things moving forward, I had to be pro-active about communicating with my friend, with residents and staff in various roles at Tukwila Springs, with staff and students in various roles at POCA Tech.
This effort has been more than worth it. It has been deeply gratifying to see people who have had hard lives get some peace, pain relief and better sleep as a result of bringing pop-up clinics to their community.