ACUPUNCTURISTS WITHOUT BORDERS

AWB hopes to bring trauma relief services (the "Medicine of Peace") to communities affected by disasters, human conflict, environmental devastation, poverty and social injustice. We are committed to collaborating with local community-based organizations and treating all who have been affected by traumatic events – survivors, first responders, emergency personnel and other care providers. We offer services and training in local communities with the goal of creating long-term, sustainable benefits after we leave. Our intention is to empower each community we serve in a way that best supports their particular needs for rebuilding and recovery.

Our overall strategy for providing trauma relief services to communities in need, as well as creating long-term trauma relief and prevention capacity locally consists of:

1. Over the last 15 years, AWB has developed and implement a mobile clinic format for trauma relief where we provide community acupuncture and other wellness services in an effective, efficient and inexpensive way. We have hundreds of practitioners across the US and worldwide who we are able to group and mobilize to respond to sudden crisis, as well as partners in some key communities who we work with to provide trauma relief services to communities affected by historic and ongoing disasters (e.g. racism and other forms of structural violence). All of the practitioners in our network are trained by AWB. Our trainings are developed and tested by our staff who are all certified practitioners with more than 15 years of experience in the field and are experienced field-workers.

2. We seek to partner with and train local practitioners and medical personnel in the communities we serve. This technical training guarantees that there will be sustainable capacity for future trauma relief and prevention as the practitioners continue to provide services in their communities. Additionally, our certification enables individuals to advance their education and become a part of our network and connect with acupuncture professionals, organizations and private businesses around the world.

AWB has the Human Resources to reach most of the US mainland and the countries where we have had previous programming. We have ongoing clinics throughout the US west coast and Puerto Rico, Mexico, Haiti, Greece, Israel/Palestine and Nepal. Our aim is to continue expanding our institutional capacity for deployment to other US states and countries with projects already underway in Texas, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, Australia and Germany. We have also recently been incorporated as an NGO in Greece, where we are leading a refugee program that we hope to expand to other parts of Europe and the Middle East currently experiencing a migration crisis. Due to the offset of the war between Ukraine and Russia, we have expanded out training and community organizing program in Europe to the Netherlands, Portugal, Norway, Germany, Poland, Romania and the UK. We are continuously adding new focus countries based on the migration flow of refugees and other migrants in the region to be able to meet the needs for trauma-informed care.

We have been offering in-person trainings for over a decade and currently offer virtual certified trainings as well. This with the hopes to continue growing the technical capacity to treat and prevent trauma in the acupuncture and mental health fields and, in conjunction with our mobile clinics and projects, reach more communities in need. Finally, we are currently working on making our essential training material available in Spanish, Ukrainian and French, to make it available to communities dealing with displacement and large-scale human mobility due to conflict and disaster.

AWB was born in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, US, where a group of acupuncturists, led my Diana Fried, provided more than 8,000 treatments to evacuees, firsts responders, emergency personnel and other communities affected by the devastating hurricane. What started as a coordinated effort to help those in need during a natural disaster, has grown into a diverse community helping bring trauma relief and other mental health services to the entire world – in places affected by disasters, human conflict, environmental devastation, poverty and social injustice.

To date AWB has treated over a million people and provided thousands of trainings to acupuncturists across the US, as well as hundreds of international practitioners. We have managed to establish, in collaboration with local practitioners and community organizations, ongoing clinics for refugees, migrants and Veterans nationally, as well as one clinic that serves pregnant individuals and deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico. We also maintain clinics to treat refugee populations in Greece and along the US-Mexico border. On the US West Coast, we have created seasonal mobile clinics to be able to respond to communities affected by Wildfires. In 2020 we also began mobilizing teams to treat people in major agricultural zones of California, where most of the US food is produced and whose residents have been working through the COVID-19 pandemic, putting their lives at risk to guarantee food security for the country. These clinics are ongoing and we are progressively expanding services to other agricultural communities in Oregon and Washington.

We are working towards developing rapid response capacity in other "at-risk" states for natural disasters in the US - Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico - as well as providing services for trauma and stress relief to first responders and communities affected by systemic racism in New York and Massachussets. Internationally, we have established a wellness center for refugees in Athens, Greece and continue to support our teams in Israel, Palestine, Nepal, Haiti and Mexico.

We are also working towards creating more technical capacity for trauma relief in the acupuncture and medicine fields worldwide, by expanding our training offer beyond to the US to Germany, the UK, Greece and Australia. In the first quarter of 2022, we trained over 600 individuals in Europe and the Americas in battlefield acupuncture and the NADA protocol, to be able to create response capacity to the refugee crisis in Europe as a result of the war in Ukraine.

Finally, we are hoping to reach more Latin American countries through our Spanish-language trainings. For us creating local capacity is essential to guaranteeing wellness sustainability in the communities we are able to reach.