Hello! Thank you to everyone out there who has supported the Curbside Care Clinic in big and small ways.
2023 was a year of exciting growth for our project. Our main area of growth is that we prioritized teaching the protocols we have developed over the last 5 years. We have become very good at helping people heal from severely infected wounds using plant based, topical treatments and we felt it was time to share our strategies with outreach organizations both locally and nationally. We have developed in-person curriculum which we shared with several small groups in Oakland and San Francisco, and then presented an 8 hour online series which reached organizations across the country. We are so proud to have been able to share our work in that way!
One of our biggest challenges this year has been around sustainability. We have long held a value around this project being volunteer run, but it has been increasingly difficult to maintain a consistent team and to commit the hours necessary to keep this project organized. We are looking ahead to sourcing grants to help address these challenges.
Funds that we raised through the workshops were used to pay our instructors, as well as to upgrade some of our equipment to allow us to be more mobile in order to find people in their dwellings instead of waiting for people to find us to receive care.
For our work in the streets, we have been in a process of assessment and restructuring to develop ways to make our services more widely accessible, including a mobile backpack and wagon setup so we can visit houseless communities more easily. We are excited to be more mobile!
In 2023, our collective gained a lot of confidence in the process of sharing our protocols in our workshops. We look forward to creating more opportunities to share our work with other organizations in the coming year. Meanwhile, we look forward to more flexibility and mobility to be able to best meet the needs of the communities we serve.
