The Beginning

The Community Acupuncture Network actually began as an afterthought. In December of 2005, Acupuncture Today advertised for new columnists. What the heck, I thought, and applied to write a column about the emerging field of social entrepreneurship. Much to my amazement, they accepted the column, and published it in February 2006. Attached to every Acupuncture Today column was a “Talk Back Forum”, an online message board where readers could communicate with the columnist. Right away, acupuncturists who read the column began writing on the Talk Back Forum, first to me, but soon to each other: questioning and examining the ideas in the column, goading the discussion along, pestering each other for details, and eventually, spurring an online community to life.

The Social Entrepreneurship column ran for a year, until the editors of Acupuncture Today decided it had “dangerous potential” and deep-sixed it. In honor of CAN’s humble beginnings, and to celebrate having our very own blog, where we can say whatever we want without fear of censorship, I would like to offer as a first blog entry the last Social Entrepreneurship column, the one that Acupuncture Today refused to print. (I always wondered if it was something I said? The straw that broke the camel’s back? Or was it just that someone finally decided to READ all of the columns they’d already printed? I guess we’ll never know...) Anyway, here it is:

[u]Social Entrepreneurship and Poverty Mentality[/u]

Friday, October 13, 2006, was a banner day for social entrepreneurship; that was the day that Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize. Before that day, many Americans were not acquainted with the Bangladeshi economist who founded Grameen Bank and started the global microcredit movement. It would be good for everyone if his name became a household word, though, because we have so much to learn from Dr. Yunus, who is one of the greatest social entrepreneurs of all time. His radically empowering understanding of economics ought to be of special interest to American acupuncturists.

Dr. Yunus believes that poverty can be eliminated -- yes, eliminated -- from the world by recognizing that every person is a potential entrepreneur and credit is a human right. These are profoundly revolutionary concepts. Consider the implications that every person has the innate ability to create his or her own livelihood through self-employment; and everyone, no matter how educated or uneducated, old or young, no matter their circumstances, should be able to borrow money to start a business. Most of Grameen's microloans go to women in rural areas; “grameen” means “village”. But Grameen goes so far as to extend loans and banking services to beggars; when they say that everyone is creditworthy, they really mean it. These principles lead inevitably to the idea that a successful business is not defined by its placement on the stock exchange; a successful business is defined by its function. Does it create a livelihood for the business owner? Does it add value in its community?

Dr. Yunus delivered the following comments as part of his 2003 Commonwealth Lecture in London, titled “Halving Poverty by 2015: We Can Actually Make It Happen”:

In some important ways our designing of the theoretical framework of economics, or its misrepresentation, is responsible for perpetuating poverty. Its conceptualization of an individual human being as “labor”took the rest of the theory on a completely wrong track. This role assigned to human beings in economic theory is certainly not something a self-respecting person can celebrate... (where) people, as providers of labor,... are born to take orders from a small group of very special kind of people known as 'entrepreneurs'...the only people who can think, organize and act. All the other people simply fill in the work slots... (and) the level of well-being of the working people depends on the level of their wages...
Try to imagine how the economists would have built their theory if they had started out with an axiom that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed with unlimited creativity, and that each of them is a potential entrepreneur...we would have created a very different, and definitely much better, world as a result. It will be an uphill task to end poverty in the world unless we create new economic thinking and get rid of the biases in our concepts, institutions, policies, and above all, our mindsets created by the existing orthodoxy. Unless we change our mindsets, we cannot change our world. (full text available at www.grameen-info.org/bank/Commonlth.html)

I first encountered Dr. Yunus' ideas a few months after I opened my clinic, when I read his book, Banker to the Poor. I was electrified. Suddenly I had a name for what I was trying to accomplish: “social entrepreneurship”. I had evidence that it could succeed. And, perhaps most importantly, I realized that I -- a working-class woman with no background in business -- had every right to call myself an entrepreneur. The world of business, which previously I had assumed only belonged to men in suits with MBAs, belonged to me too. And to women in Bangladesh selling goat's milk so that their children could go to school. Business could be egalitarian and inclusive. I had never felt so empowered in my life.

Like many other acupuncturists, I learned in practice management class that the world of business and the world of social justice are separate. If you want to charge less than market rates, I was told, find a free clinic to volunteer in once a week. Success as an acupuncturist meant having a fancy office and lots of patients paying high prices. That vision of success meant nothing to me, and so I gave up on business altogether. I had no idea that in doing so I was giving up a part of myself; that at heart I am an entrepreneur, and that I love business as much as I love acupuncture. I love business as much as I love my community and my working class roots. Muhammad Yunus gave me the concepts that allowed me to put all of my love in the same place.

I have lost track of how many times I have been accused by other acupuncturists of suffering from “poverty mentality” because one of my goals is to treat people who work for minimum wage at prices they can afford. I would argue that this is a misunderstanding of the term; “poverty mentality” actually best describes the biases and assumptions of the orthodoxy in the acupuncture world, which are indeed creating poverty for the majority of practitioners. According to many estimates, at least 50% of us are no longer practicing five years after graduation, because we couldn't make a living doing acupuncture.

“Poverty mentality” includes the assumption that the only market for acupuncture is upper middle class; the assumption that dollars-per-treatment is the only way to measure success; and perhaps worst of all, the assumption that acupuncture cannot become widely accepted in America until either big corporations or the government give it an official nod of recognition. Those three assumptions needlessly constrict our patient base, strangle our creativity, and deprive us of our power. The opposite of poverty mentality is the resolve to create wealth. Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank can serve as an inspiration and a reminder to us that if we create new thinking about the economics of acupuncture, we can indeed create wealth.