Celebrating Our New Space and Community
November 13, 2024
Have you heard? We moved into a new clinic space! If you haven’t had a chance to visit our new location yet, consider this your official virtual welcome. We can’t wait for you to come and see it in person.
With all the work put in over the past year (!!!!!) towards the opening of our new clinic, we wanted to share our deep gratitude for the village that made it all possible. The occasion is an extra special one, as we opened the original Cheerful Pelvis clinic 10 days before we had to temporarily close our doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, we never quite got around to celebrating our original opening!
This time, we took the opportunity to make a bit more of a splash with a community launch event (scroll down for photos!) and reflect on how far we have come since that first year.
Here are a few of the folks who deserve some special recognition.
Our Cheerful Village
Our Team is a wonderful symbiosis of different roles, skills, backgrounds, and ways of working and collaborating. We’re grateful for each and every member of our internal team, which includes physiotherapists, physio support workers, Pilates instructors, client care coordinators, our Head of Operations and Growth, and our Director of Clinical Services. We’re also grateful for the support of our fractional marketing team, Crisp, and our bookkeeping staff from CCE Consulting!
Part of why we are so excited about this new space is that its layout is purpose-built to support the needs of our staff. We’ve now got offices, a much larger movement space, a meeting room for 1:1 mentorship and staff collaboration, and much more room for charting, storage, seating, and staff breaks! It’s our firm belief that when our staff are happy at work, and properly supported and cared for, they are able to provide the very best possible care to our clients.
Our Project Village
Marine, our Head of Operations and Growth, did an incredible job project managing this new clinic space to life. We’re also thankful to our realtor, Tara Finnegan, and Level One Construction for doing such an amazing job in making our vision a reality.
Our Professional Village
As pelvic health physiotherapists who believe in whole-person care and treating root causes, we know that we can’t treat people in isolation. We’re grateful for the support of referring professionals and anyone who has recommended us over the years, and proud to work and collaborate within a community of healthcare workers who are equally passionate about what they do, be it massage, naturopathy, therapy, medicine, or any other discipline that intersects with the pelvic health space.
The Story Behind the Move
At this point, you might be wondering: what prompted our move to the new space?
Anniken, our clinic’s owner, originally conceived of The Cheerful Pelvis as a sort of experiment in figuring out how to best serve both clients and staff in the pelvic health space. The idea came partly from the observation that many clinics are not purpose-built for pelvic health work and the types of treatments it requires – and that they don’t tend to be staffed, run, or operationalized to properly support staff and clients. (For example, making sure the space is inclusive in terms of things like toilet access is an important consideration for clients working on bladder and bowel issues.)
Starting from this place of curiosity and creativity, Anniken signed a 5-year lease on the original space – but along the way, the clinic really took off! Both the team and the number of clients grew very quickly, and eventually, the layout started to feel prohibitive. It was getting harder for multiple appointments at once to share the movement space, for example. Our staff room was also tiny (we mean TINY!), which didn’t support how we wanted our staff to be able to show up and experience their day-to-day at work.
When it comes to serving our clients, we value community, education, movement, accessibility, collaboration, and the normalization of experiences and symptoms. All of these are antithetical to the type of “closed-door rehab” that a typical clinic layout might offer – and call for much more open, communal space. Meanwhile, there’s a growing body of research about the incredible effectiveness of group classes for treating certain conditions, so we also wanted to be able to expand our service offerings to include more of those, too.
The New Cheerful by the Numbers
So, how does the new space compare to our original location? Here are some quick stats:
- We went from having 4 treatment rooms to 7
- Our staff room is 6 times the size it was previously
- Our new movement space is 2 times the size of the old one!
- In terms of overall square footage, we grew from 1250 square feet to 2700 square feet
And of course, there are some things that numbers just can’t quite capture! We’re so grateful to have learned and evolved our practices from working with our many clients over the years, as well as the professionals who co-treat them alongside us.
A Cheerful Celebration
To celebrate the occasion, we hosted a special clinic launch event with some of our fellow Vancouver pelvic health professionals at the beginning of the month. It was a Cheerful evening all around: a long-overdue chance to connect face-to-face with our peers, supporters, and friends, as well as an opportunity to recognize and reflect on 5 years of being in business and everything we have created.
Thank you as well to the following folks who generously provided door prizes and goodie bags for our guests:
Come See Us!
If you’re a current client, we look forward to welcoming you back for your next appointment in our new home. And if you’re new to the Cheerful community, welcome! You can find us at our new home at 2730 Commercial Drive, Suite 203, Vancouver, BC.