WCA Rockwood, Part Two
on transitions
Part One is about how we landed in our WCA Rockwood space as a result of a catastrophic fire that destroyed our clinic in Lents. This post is about the larger context — WCA in 2026 and what happens going forward.
WCA has been around long enough — 24 years and counting — to try lots of things and to watch other community acupuncture clinics try lots of things.1 We hope to be around for a lot longer, which means that every decade or so we have to take stock of our environment and how it’s changed, along with what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Back in 2002, my goal in opening a clinic was to replace the public health acupuncture job I’d lost due to funding cuts. Once that happened, I wanted to make jobs for other acupuncturists too. I thought that if I just provided the right small business container — including the structure for W-2 employment as opposed to having independent contractors — other acupuncturists could succeed in the same way that I did. I was missing the part about how even when you’re a W-2 employee, you need to really, really want to build a practice. You can’t just clock in and clock out, you have to give it your whole self — and not everyone is in a position to do that. A community acupuncture clinic that runs on narrow margins can’t keep paying an acupuncturist who can’t fill their schedule, because the cash flow just isn’t there. Other community acupuncture clinics had similar experiences with their own hires.
Nonetheless, for a long time, WCA held onto the goal of continually making more clinics and more jobs in order to create access to acupuncture. No matter how challenging it proved to be. We were missing the part about how acupuncturists, regardless of where they work, are always responsible — to some degree — for creating their own jobs.
Around 2012, we realized that an obstacle to making clinics and making jobs for acupuncturists was that conventional acupuncture schools didn’t prepare their graduates to work in clinics like ours, so we took a deep breath and decided to make our own school — where we promptly ran into the same issue. Teaching students the real world skills to work in community acupuncture clinics — and even giving them opportunities to practice those skills before they graduate — still wasn’t enough to ensure their success afterwards. They still needed to put their whole selves into building a practice. No matter what kind of schooling you get, acupuncture’s a tough business, and there’s no substitute for passion. You have to really, really want it.
Fast forward another decade or so (with a brief intermission for a pandemic and a lockdown). We’ve learned a lot about how to run a school and how to prepare graduates — in part by focusing on entrepreneurship and leadership — but now we need to adapt to a new economic landscape. Everything is more expensive, for everybody. Also, time keeps passing (what’s up with that?) and if WCA’s going to be around for a few more decades, we have to work on succession planning. Many small businesses don’t live beyond their founders, but I’d like for WCA to beat those odds; it’s come a long way since it was just my practice, and it’s important to a lot of people now.
For the last few years we’ve been tightening up WCA’s systems to make it a more success-ible organization. And as we dug into the financials, we discovered that WCA Rockwood’s been losing $100K per year.
Some of that’s to be expected, because student shifts generally lose money, but WCA’s total revenue is around $900K, give or take, so $100K is…a lot. Our newest clinic, WCA North, has been able to basically break even since it opened in 2023, in part because it’s small — only 1200 square feet — and it doesn’t have student shifts. For a variety of reasons, WCA Rockwood never really got off the ground, financially.
The lesson seems to be that WCA can’t open brick-and-mortar clinics unless the conditions are exactly right, and those conditions are rarer than we thought, both in terms of spaces and in terms of personnel. Our goal of automatically opening a new clinic every few years and staffing it with new graduates just isn’t realistic. The stars have to align in some very specific ways. Also: to adapt to our current economic environment and prepare for the future, we need to shrink our physical footprint. Succession planning requires resources (that’s a whole other post).
At the same time, thanks to 5NP in Oregon, another way to make acupuncture accessible has opened up. The beautiful thing about 5NP is that trained, trusted community members can bring acupuncture to places that WCA itself could never reach. Developing organizational partnerships and providing 5NP trainings is a more sustainable way for us to make acupuncture accessible to people than serially opening brick and mortar clinics. At least, in the current economy.
You can see where I’m going with this, and I wish I weren’t. There’s no way that we can renew our lease in the WCA Rockwood space. We simply can’t afford the rent; we couldn’t have afforded it in the first place, back in 2016, without the insurance compensation from the fire. We also can’t afford to replace it right away with another brick and mortar clinic.
We know that WCA Rockwood is deeply meaningful to many people — patients, volunteers, students, graduates and punks — and we were hoping to find a way out of this scenario. We don’t want to leave East Portland and we don’t want to close this clinic. Given all the factors — a corporate landlord we can’t negotiate with, a space that’s never been able to cover its costs, and the impact of inflation, we don’t have much choice about it.
Since 2024, WCA Rockwood is no longer our official, ACAHM-approved student clinic; our classroom space on NE 42nd Ave now fills that role — thanks to another amazing human landlord plus a lot of support from NAYA. That means we can transition out of WCA Rockwood without jeopardizing our school’s accreditation.
When we approached our Rockwood landlords about how to navigate the end of our lease and the rent that we can’t afford, the only viable solution they offered was for us to let them start showing the space immediately — so that they can find another tenant who can pay them better than we do, at which point we’d need to leave. We accepted, which means we’ll have to be out of the space by June 30 at the latest, and possibly sooner if they find a new tenant.
We’d love to find an organizational partner who’s interested in collaborating with us to provide free community acupuncture in East Portland. We’ve been sending out feelers for a few months but we don’t yet have a place to land. If you’ve got space to share somewhere in The Numbers a few times a week, we’ve got acupuncturists (or acupuncture students and supervisors). We don’t need to make money on an East Portland clinic, we just need to stop losing so much. We’ll keep looking for an East Portland partner who can help us continue to serve our patients there.
We’ll share more details in the coming weeks about our transition out of the space. Before we get into all that, though, I wanted to try to give you as much context as possible for how we made this decision. In some ways it feels like losing WCA Lents all over again, though with more advance notice. This time we’ll have a farewell party — stay tuned.
As I mentioned in Part One, another priceless learning opportunity was watching Modern Acupuncture try to scale up our model for capitalist success — and then watching it fail. A post about that is in the works.