The People's Organization of Community Acupuncture, or POCA for short
/For this first blog post on our new (!!) website, I want to talk about POCA. Mainly because PCA wouldn't be here without it! Well, technically, it started out as the Community Acupuncture Network (CAN) and then became the multi-stakeholder co-operative that it is today. There is always a lot happening over at pocacoop.com, but the biggest development of the past few years was the launching of POCA's own acupuncture school, POCA Technical Institute (PTI or POCA Tech for short). Two cohorts have now graduated and the school is nearing accreditation by the NCCAOM. It's huge. Golden Ana Re is a student at POCA Tech and shadowed the practitioners at PCA for awhile -- some of you may remember her.
UPDATE (8/30/26): In 2019, PCA’s Ellen Vincent developed a curriculum so that the POCA Cooperative could launch its Auricular Acupuncture Technician Training program to teach and certify 5NP providers (who usually are not licensed acupuncturists, that’s the whole point) whom POCA called AATs. This effort is similar to the work that NADA has been doing nationally and internationally since the 1980s. 5NP laws vary widely from state to state, even more than acupuncture licensing laws. POCA has put on many AAT trainings and has been very successful in spreading 5NP. And last year, POCA Tech started training licensed acupuncturists (L.Acs ) in a state where “5NP Techs” (who are not licensed acupuncturists) are certified by an organization named POCA. The school and the co-op are separate organizations but people tend to refer to both of them as “POCA”. This confused both the public and the regulators.
Last fall POCA Tech realized they had to fix this in order to distinguish between an Oregon community acupuncture school that trains future licensed acupuncturists and a national organization that certifies 5NP Techs. And so, in November, their Board of Directors voted to change the school’s name to the Oregon College of Community Acupuncture, and their new acronym is ORCCA.