Chiara Francesca believes trauma-informed acupuncture is communal care.
By Grace Del Vecchio
(Photo: Grace Del Vecchio/City Bureau)
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
A rainbow of storefront window paint invites passersby in with intriguing messages: “We will grow new systems,” “Center the margins,” and “Abolish prisons and cops.”
An acupuncturist by trade, Chiara Francesca warmly greets me as I enter and asks if we have met before—we have not. Still, our conversation felt deeply familiar, as if we had known one another, speaking as naturally as old friends. We stroll through their Hermosa space with untamed pothos plants growing freely, their gentle yellow and green colors mixing with bright artwork on the walls. It’s a space designed for healing: where people could gather for relaxing group acupuncture or calming yoga sessions led by Leucas Miller, a trans person of color before the pandemic. Currently, they only offer sliding scale acupuncture.
Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese form of medicine where thin needles are inserted into the body to open “energy points” and treat pain. Practitioners like Chiara believe mental pain and psychological trauma can manifest themselves in the body, and acupuncture is one way to release it. “Trauma is part of most people's lives, especially people who are poor, or racialized, or immigrants,” they explain.
For Chiara, acupuncture is a path to healing justice—one that shifts and transforms harm—that they want to share with Chicagoans seeking relief from trauma, PTSD and mental health struggles.
They point to the history of acupuncture in the U.S., where both the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords learned traditional Chinese acupuncture to heal their communities. Acupuncture was used, at times, as an alternative to methadone in substance dependency treatment. In the early 1970s, the two revolutionary groups and the Republic of New Afrika developed the 3 to 5 point ear acupuncture protocol to combat withdrawal symptoms, later standardized as the “NADA Protocol,” at the Lincoln Detox center in the Bronx.
“[The space] became a community center where people would show up, be together and be served by people who were part of their same community. So the hierarchy of, ‘Here's the doctor, and they have all the answers...,’ was completely turned on its head,” they explain.
Chiara found inspiration in how the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords centered the needs of their communities and removed the usual hierarchy between practitioners and patients—“holding horizontal relationships of power as much as possible with the people around you and teaching each other the tools of how we move collectively towards health,” they say.
While the U.S. government has largely erased the Black Panther Party and Young Lords’ contributions from history, Chiara honors them through acupuncture. Their antiracist lens and sliding scale rates aim to empower and heal the communities most harmed at the hands of white supremacy.
Chiara Francesca’s space in Hermosa. (Photo: Grace Del Vecchio/City Bureau)
After emigrating with twin toddlers in the early 2000s from Italy, they found solace in Humboldt Park and Hermosa’s immigrant communities. Chiara is an acupuncturist and an organizer, artist and former teen parent living with a disability. Being open and honest about their identity is necessary for all their work—acupuncture, organizing and art alike. On their website, they devote a section to just that, acknowledging that they are not of the lineage from which acupuncture originated but that their goal in practicing it is to make it accessible for all communities.
Chiara’s healing work began with helping domestic violence and sexual assault survivors in Indiana. At the time, they were coming to terms with their own experience with domestic violence and abuse, and their response was often adversarial. “Like, ‘how do we dismantle the patriarchy and make it so not one more person is harmed?’” they remember thinking. “I was thinking less in terms of what we need to build.”
Up until that moment, Chiara’s experience with organizing and life was “we push as hard as we can ... and even if your body breaks down you keep going, otherwise like you don't actually care.” However, a chance encounter with group acupuncture in 2010 at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit changed their mind on the importance of self-care in movement work. “It was the first time [I looked] at a different way of operating from survival, scarcity and crisis. How do we do this in the long haul and not mistreat ourselves and each other in the process?”
Returning to Chicago, Chiara went back to juggling multiple jobs while their kids were in middle school, and their health began to fail. While they found affordable acupuncture at a sliding scale health clinic, it felt uncomfortable and invasive. “When you lay down, this person does things to your body, it's painful, and you don't get to have a say in what happens,” they remember. While Chiara hated how they felt during treatment because of the lack of autonomy, the only alternative was surgery.
Eventually, they found trauma-informed sliding scale acupuncture care with a radical political lens through Sage Community Health Collective, which they describe as “life-changing.” When the group closed its door a few years later, Chiara realized that Chicago no longer had an affordable and safe acupuncture space for people like themself who work minimum wage jobs and often struggle to pay rent. The realization inspired Chiara to start their own practice.
In turning to acupuncture as a healing tool for themself and others, Chiara had to address their own limitations and boundaries regarding burnout, the physical demand of organizing and their disability.
This forced them to be more intentional about offering acupuncture to members of communities that either do not have access to it or do not feel safe or respected in traditional medical spaces, such as trans and gender non-conforming folks, poor people, people of color, queer folks, people with disabilities and immigrants. They offer sliding scale rates and work to ensure their space is safe by recognizing the systemic ways that “trauma seeps into people’s lives” and centering the needs of those who come in search of healing.
When Chiara thinks of providing acupuncture for people in movements like #NoCopAcademy and Stop General Iron, they believe the first step is to acknowledge that trauma-informed care cannot be divorced from the reality that business and government often create trauma in people's lives in the first place. Healers, they believe, have to be a part of the fight, too.
Grace Del Vecchio (she/her) is a former City Bureau civic reporting fellow and freelance storyteller from Philly based in Chicago. She reports on policing, the Chicago budget, community organizing and more.
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