thyme=money=chee(se)

The other day I received a card from a chiropractor I had seen a few times a couple of years ago after I went overboard using a chain saw. I didn’t commit any gruesome acts but the end result was that my neck was so stiff that I couldn’t turn my head. Friends recommended this chiropractor. What I didn’t like about my experience with this practitioner and her practice was that she acted like I was something special (was she hoping for referrals?) when actually I wasn’t. I don’t mind not being special, I minded the pretense that I was. She told me since she was going on vacation (and my neck was still painful) that I should come in the next day before she opened at 6:45am. I arrived early to find several other people, apparently in the same special boat as me. I guess the chiropractor was trying to make us all feel like there was enough of her to go around even though she was actually terribly overbooked. There just wasn’t enough time in the day to get all her patients in, even with a full office staff, and all sorts of clever and persistent marketing. Just the other day, more than a year since I last visited this office, I received a coupon for a free “back to school” treatment, with a follow-up call a week later. I declined. The practitioner’s work was okay, it was more the sense of her time being “so valuable” that she was trying to stretch it far beyond the limits of the most flexible of realities. I was only paying a co-pay, but I wanted something different for my dollars.
There are several types of value tied up in a healing practice. There are the tangible health benefits of the medicine, e.g. now I can turn my head, I am sleeping or breathing better. There are more subtle benefits like feeling relaxed, or making time in one’s busy life to address health. There are the benefits of a CA practice like more affordable treatments, or group qi. There is the very tangible benefit that means a making a living. Jordan mentioned E.F.Schumacher’s idea of “Right Livelihood” from the book Small is Beautiful-Economics as if People Mattered which very succinctly is the idea that we work in ways that create compassion, mercy and that nurture life and that we don’t work solely for money or material gains.
Right Livelihood is all right with me. I also want the folks I work with to have access to Right Livelihood. By the very nature of our jobs we are creating more compassion, mercy and nurturance in the world, and I don’t think any of us are working solely for money, but we all need some money. Having gone from being a sole proprietor (and the sole employee of my business) to the person who makes a labor budget and recruits volunteers for a community acupuncture clinic with 3 acupuncturists has got my head spinning a little. I want my practice to reflect my values. I want my fees to reflect a fair exchange, and given the cost of delivering acupuncture I think they are. I want what I pay, or how I compensate volunteers to be fair too.
I’ve been crunching a lot of numbers lately (and praying for my very own Lupine to appear). One such number crunch estimates that if the clinic has six patients per day paying $20/each we break even with all of our expenses. A huge chunk of running my clinic is the labor budget. And this is where I have been struggling lately wondering how to align my values with my business. I value the people I work with tremendously. I could not be doing a community clinic without them. Or maybe I could, but I wouldn’t want to because the clinic is far too busy for one person to run. But this new role as “boss” challenges me in ways that I never imagined facing.
This summer things have been really (but typically) slow, and so some of my struggles have come from this. We are still managing to break even, but things have been a lot tighter. I expect that as the school year begins and the students return (there are 5 colleges/universities in Providence) we are going to be even busier than we were this spring when we were approaching 70 patients/week with the clinic open 26 hours/week. When the schedule is full the inflow/outflow flows a lot better. I don’t have to hold off ordering herbs because rent is coming due. But perhaps all of this is part of my struggles as well: I am the sole person in charge of these money decisions. Call me a throw back but I have leanings towards exchanging treatments for garden vegetables, or fresh eggs, or a sheep, etc. and the idea has crossed my mind about running PCA as a cooperative. Then I wouldn’t be alone in making these big decisions.
If one possible equation is money=value and I value local, organic, ecologically sound food sources are of value to me then this would be a fair exchange. I am not naïve enough to believe that everyone will want to exchange for goods or service, but I am also not so cynical that I don’t see the tremendous value in an economy outside of currency. Not everyone values food like I do so if we just keep to the money=value equation and I want to value the people who work at the clinic then I want to make sure they feel valued by paying them a fair wage or compensating them for volunteering in some way, like by serving the community with an affordable acupuncture clinic. Most importantly, I need to remember that money=value is not the only equation.
One of the front desk people makes her living in a wonderfully diverse way: she gardens and sells produce as part of a small CSA, and at a farmers market, does landscaping, house painting, and house/pet sits. In the wintertime she works full-time for several months for a local university in one of the administrative offices. And she works at PCA. She is friendly, reliable, hard working, and loves the ideas behind community acupuncture. Last week she proposed that instead of exchanging money for her time, we exchange time for time. She needs help in her gardens and with the house painting. If I do a time exchange and bring someone to help her, she will credit me for that time too. I love this idea. I have another friend who is just starting up a small cheese making business. I volunteered to help already. She wants to bring the reality of local dairies producing local cheese into being. We all have small businesses that need help, but we also have limited funds. I don’t have tons of extra free time, but I have some. I like that this idea values our commitment to seeing one other succeed and it uses our richest most available resource: community. For some success is driving a Porche, but you can’t eat one.