The Barefoot Collective: Solidarity Through Community Acupuncture

By Rhonda Coleman

Building Tools to Build Resilience and Self-Sufficiency in Response to Violence, Poverty and Injustice

In this issue’s focus on community, I would like to highlight an organization that really takes the idea of community health to heart.

Ryan Bemis is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine who has organized a global collective of professional healers to train communities to use the National Acupuncture Detox Association (NADA) protocol. Acudetox.com notes the NADA Protocol as a non-verbal approach to healing that involves gentle placement of up to five small, sterilized disposable acupuncture needles into specific sites on each ear.

With this in mind, the Barefoot Acupuncture Movement is on a mission to empower others through community health education and service.

Acudetox was developed in the 1970s during the height of the heroin epidemic that was devastating Black and Hispanic communities in the United States. The NADA protocol exists today because of grass roots organizing by the Black Panther Party and The Young Lords in New York City at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx Neighborhood (see the film “Dope is Death” on vice.com). Without their contributions, NADA would not be the organization it is today.

The protocol reduces substance cravings, minimizes symptoms of substance withdrawal and decreases stress. A Regional NADA Trainer leads trainings and workshops to certify professionals in NADA so that they can perform Acudetox treatments. I needed a mentor during my process of becoming a Regional Trainer (RT) for the NADA Acudetox Protocol and subsequently met Ryan Bemis online via an email introduction from my friend, Claudia Voyles.

I chatted with Bemis after attending one of the Barefoot Acupuncture Movement (BAM) seminars last summer and expressed my admiration for the level of thoughtfulness, community care and love I witnessed in his approach.

The BAM model draws from a long tradition of acupuncturebased humanitarian aid that started with the Barefoot Doctor Movement, originally developed in China and expanded by the World Health Organization in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It builds on the foundation exemplified by development within underserved regions. By partnering with, and offering safe and sustainable models of healthcare, they have found that even the most marginalized and under-resourced communities can use acupuncture to build resilience and selfsufficiency in response to violence, poverty and injustice.

BAM partners with people affected by injustice to rebuild resilience using acupuncture. The organization seeks to create a more socially diverse, global acupuncture workforce by mobilizing disaster response, and engaging in grassroots community modern day Barefoot programs, including those of Dr. Michael Smith, NADA affiliates in the U.S. and Europe and the Guatemalan Acupuncture and Medical Aid Project. These programs reinforce local autonomy, and Bemis learned a lot from them. By expanding practices they pioneered, BAM innovated a core acupuncture curriculum of basic, simple and safe techniques and created advanced training modules for students to study.

What Is Community?

I wondered how this group defined community, and what it meant to help connect others who might be considered to be from “other” communities.

Kata Japuncic, a member of the BAM collective, described community as something that is always in the process of becoming. Simultaneously a “doing-word” that is revealed in our actions and attitudes, as well as “the spaces we create around and between each other and how we hold that space.”

Another collective member, Megan Yarberry, describes it as any group that comes together for common purpose or because of common circumstance.

NADA ADS training in Ugandan refugee camp

“While we may not always be able to choose the community we find ourselves in, we can make a conscious effort to go out and find or build something meaningful,” she says.

Bemis says community makes him more open to other ways of being. “Community is that which breaks me open and gives me the opportunity to grow, move through, take responsibility,” he adds.

BAM works to train people from BIPOC communities how to cultivate a space of sovereignty in health, through simple protocols and basic techniques using this ancient therapy called acupuncture. In this way, they have something new that they can use to help build community. They are connected to something larger than just treating one individual. They can become participants in the recovery of their community.

Anthropologist Paul Farmer said, “Without solidarity, the noblest of human sentiments will be washed away.”

Bemis agrees, saying, “You can have a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of things with a whole lot of good intentions and points and needles, but to create authentic, conscious, healthy community not based on dependency and colonialism — you must have solidarity.”

Partnering Around The Globe

Internally, the BAM Collective is cultivating a culture of trust, establishing a common language, and sharing in mutual respect among the members of the collective and the communities and organization with whom they engage.

In its international efforts, BAM serves as a platform to share ideas, projects, needs, insights and resources.

Because a main focus of the group is on acupuncture projects around the world, partnering with local stakeholders and other individuals or groups that serve in the same areas of interest as BAM is critical.

Each individual project becomes a sort of center of gravity for those the organization trains and the populations they serve.

Japuncic shares, “Using acupuncture as a resiliencebuilding tool in service of community-led responses to social injustice and structural harms embraces practical skillsharing that’s grounded in anti-oppression principles and an ethic of love.”

This coalescing of intention and attention creates community.

“By sharing knowledge and experience with others, we hope they will be more resilient and autonomous, better positioned to navigate their own course into the future. And, of course, we also are the better for this experience, gaining new perspectives, knowledge of and appreciation for others. When we weave our lives together, we are more strengthened and interesting than if we remain individual threads,” says Yarberry.

Putting It All Together

It’s so refreshing to see a group of people not just helping, but empowering communities to strengthen and maintain independence in their health and wellbeing. To give something that can be passed on is an act of love, to teach communities to fish rather than giving out fish dinners is a demonstration of solidarity. BAM continues to grow. There are now members of the collective in the U.S., Central America, Africa, Asia, and Australia.