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OCOM Receives $130,000 Capacity Building Grant from Meyer Memorial Trust

April 14, 2015

A $130,000 capacity building grant awarded to Oregon College of Oriental Medicine by Meyer Memorial Trust on March 1 will fund a new Director of Annual Giving position over the next three years. This new full-time staff position and expansion of OCOM’s annual fund will increase the ability to build long-term, sustainable funding for the college.

Since relocating its campus to Portland’s Old Town Chinatown neighborhood in 2012, OCOM has initiated a successful annual fundraising event and built a more visible community presence in the new neighborhood. While these successes mark important milestones for the college, an increased need to expand development efforts became clear after OCOM’s February 2014 six-year strategic planning session.

The planning group identified the need to create a more diverse funding base to support our mission by expanding efforts to move away from tuition dependence. Like many universities and colleges across the United States, a downturn in enrollment in 2012 and 2013 which, coupled with campus relocation operational costs, led OCOM to prioritize an expansion of the Institutional Advancement department in 2015. The new director position will support growth of OCOM’s annual fund, deepened collaborative partnerships, and expanded capacity for community giving.

The greatest beneficiary of enhanced fundraising capacity will be OCOM’s clinics. The college teaching clinics intentionally provide low-cost health care options for the Portland metro region to ensure broad access to affordable integrative health care. While the college charges $25 per treatment, the full cost of each visit is $40. Foundation grants, individual donations, and revenues from student tuition cover the difference between the actual cost of delivering the care and the patient fee.

In 2013, the college’s two master’s program teaching clinics provided 22,000 patient visits; 85 percent of those visits were for individuals who self-identified as low-income. In addition, OCOM’s community partnership projects and externship opportunities are focused on expanding access to low-cost or free acupuncture health care in the region to underserved community members and chronically ill patients at other health care institutions. Those include organizations such as Outside In, Central City Concern, Hooper Detox, and other Coalition of Community Health Clinics’ locations.

To learn more about the position summary: http://ocom.edu/director-of-annual-giving

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About Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM)

Founded in 1983, OCOM is a single-purpose, nonprofit graduate school that offers two specialized degree programs: Master of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (MAcOM) and Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (DAOM). OCOM’s mission is to transform health care by educating highly skilled and compassionate practitioners, providing exemplary patient care, and engaging in innovative research within a community of service and healing. Our 1,300 graduates practice, teach and research Chinese medicine in 44 states and across the globe, and have provided an estimated 10 million treatments over the past 32 years. Additional information about the college is available on our website.

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