Since May Day 2011, Open Space Community Acupuncture has offered affordable, community acupuncture in the heart of Somerville, rooted in the belief that healing is both personal and collective.

Our Story: Founding Open Space Community Acupuncture in Somerville

From Private to Community Practice

Open Space Community Acupuncture founder, Daphne Jochnick had been in private practice for over a decade  when she discovered the community acupuncture model. Though her practice thrived it was too rarefied a world. Questions of who could afford to come in for treatment, and who could afford to become an acupuncturist, led her to nearly leave the profession.

Fortunately she came across C.A.N., the Community Acupuncture Network  which acupuncturist Lisa Rohleder and colleagues created to address just such questions. CAN (now the People’s Organization of Community Acupuncture (POCA)) helped  practitioners convert from private practice to community acupuncture [1], fostered community acupuncture clinics around the country,  started a thriving affordable community acupuncture school, and created grants to help open clinics in underserved areas. By the time Andrew Cheever and Malik Mahmud graduated with their masters and doctorate in Acupuncture respectively, community acupuncture was well known, and the two graduates were able to go directly into community work. 

Becoming a Liberation Acupuncture Clinic

Today Open Space Community Acupuncture operates as a liberation acupuncture clinic. We acknowledge the debt we owe, as community acupuncturists, to the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, two groups challenging racism and oppression in the 1970s who fought to bring affordable group acupuncture into their communities. Inspired by their example of starting community acupuncture clinics within a liberation and social justice framework, we see the need for collective healing to go along with individual wellness.

As a Liberation Acupuncture Clinic, Open Space recognizes:

• Collective Health: Mental and physical health consequences of systemic oppression—including racism, queermisia, transmisia, xenomisia, sexism, ableism, anti-fat bias, casteism, Islamomisia, and antisemitism. Settler-colonialism, caste hierarchy, arbitrary detention, racial profiling, separation of families, and all other forms of oppression devastate immediately impacted communities and have downstream effects on all of humanity.
• Centered on the Marginalized: No one’s liberation is complete if others remain excluded. Health is not binary. Disability, neurodivergence, chronic illness, and fatness can be sites of knowledge and resistance rather than deficits.
• Roots in Liberation Theology: We draw inspiration from Liberation Theology and the Healing Justice movements.
• Trauma-Informed Care: We treat everyone as if they might have a trauma history and take care to prevent accidental harm.