can't take the farmer out of the suburban
Posted May 27th, 2008 by main street acu...
I have been working on this urban / suburban gardening idea with a buddy of mine and came across these folks
Enjoy
http://www.communityrootsboulder.com/
BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!
I love it!
Very cool...
So James, what exactly are you thinking of with this idea? Are you connecting it at all with your clinic? I'm asking because WCA's relationship with our local CSA didn't seem to go anywhere long term -- they got big enough that they didn't need us as a drop site anymore, and we got more focused on just doing acupuncture, as opposed to acupuncture plus other things -- but it still seems like community agriculture and community acupuncture go together somehow. If you have ideas I'm curious.
CSA at TTP
I have a CSA dropping-off their produce here on Saturday mornings for this upcoming growing season. My patients were really excited about it--a lot of them didn't know about CSA's or understand the difference between a CSA share and the farmer's market.
The CSA is excited, because I was able to bring some more share holders in to their farm through promoting the farm at my clinic. While the CSA farmers haven't stopped in for acupuncture yet, they've talked about it. I may receive a few new patients through the CSA by having them visit my clinic weekly for drop-offs.
I think it'll help keep my first summer's numbers stay a bit more steady, as I'll have patients who have to come to the clinic on Saturday mornings to pick-up their shares, so they might as well stop in for a poke, too. (The trend I've seen in other practices is that summer numbers really bottom out.)
I'll let you know what develops from this relationship as it progresses...
"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." --Rumi
www.TheTurningPointAcupuncture.com
lots of ideas
howdy lisaFirstly, it came from a movie I saw and discovered when i first researched community + acupuncture in google. the movie is called "Community Solution". Briefly its about Cuba after the fall of the USSR and how they dealt with their imposed peak oil crisis.Their agriculture was highly dependent on oil and petro-additives. Next, it came from a client who works a minimum wage job but comes from a family of gardeners. He was bemoaning the loss of the community garden accross from a subsidized housing building to a developer who subsequently due to falling housing prices has done nothing with the land(save the falling down chainlink fence). So, we had devised a draft ourselves of what turns out these folks are up to.Personally, I am just consulting so to speak to get this guy to do it and at a living wage and such. Other than that, its heartening that all sorts of folks and professions are finding solutions and i wanted to share the boulder folks ingenuity with yall. in other newsI am also working with a couple. One who is a proficient electrical engineer and the other a environmental designer(or something) graduate student who are using an idea of using local community resources to decentralize electric generation for her thesis.The idea is that the local street lights and municipal structures would be fitted with solar panels and the power would got to the grid... the savings would help build retention ponds and storm drains with micro hydrogenerators... how this generates clients or improves diagnosis and results is obviously less tangible currently yin tang, jimmy jabs