In 2016 the NYC mental health housing agency Community Access gave me a chance while I was on work release. I got an entry-level job as a service coordinator in Supportive Housing. I worked in a building with folks with mental health diagnoses - and I didn’t even really know what those were. I had to look it up. It was from my co-workers that I first learned about Harm Reduction - and my life changed immediately.

From volunteering at the Washington Heights Corner Project making safer drug use kits to providing NADA protocol acupuncture for the New York Harm Reduction Educators, I immersed myself in the world of Harm Reduction. I realized that although abstinence was working for me, many people had no desire to stop using drugs, and in fact they found them very helpful in a variety of ways. Members of the Harm Reduction Committee at Community Access taught me about self-determination, bodily autonomy, and respecting the right of individuals to choose the lives that they felt were best for them. I grew a deep respect for the choices of others.

Furthermore, Harm Reduction is a philosophy that leads to a set of practices. It is the philosophy that I buy into. Self-determination, Social Justice, Human Rights, Peer Expertise, Trauma-informed based support, Maximizing Options, Low-Threshold Services… if you are into those then you are probably a Harm Reductionist too.

I went back to school. I got my Masters in Mental Health Counseling and got my license. I understood that I needed that meal ticket to hold the jobs where I could make an impact, and I used my privilege to get that (and a bunch of loans). But what I learned in school has been almost no help to me. People are experts in their own lives - I’m no expert in your experience. One of the most important practices I have is to constantly be listening to people living with mental health diagnoses, to people who use drugs, to people who are unhoused, to people who do sex work, and to believe them when they tell me. Believe what? I believe them when they tell me what it’s like to be them, and what would be helpful. Simple, but not easy if you think you know what’s best for someone else.

I joined IDHA - a school for Transformative Mental Health and eventually became a board member. We provide education and community for mental health service users, activists, artists, family members, formally trained clinicians - everyone! The idea is that if we can equalize power and get all the folx in a room we might actually see the soup we’re swimming in is what’s making us sick: the us-them mentality. The obsession with measurement and comparison. The destruction of community. The capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal state that divides us all.

I now direct a Shelter-ACT Team. We are part of the carceral mental health system - but I’m trying to change that. I work with my fantastic staff to constantly challenge assumptions about people. How can we lessen our own power? How can we walk-with? How can we accompany folx on their journey that started long before we got here and will hopefully go on long after we are gone? We wrestle with those questions every day as we try to support folks who are unhoused, uncomfortable, unsupported, but not without hope. We work in the streets and the shelters of NYC. We show up and we name the obvious truth - that it is a sad state of affairs when the only help to arrive is paid help.

So we work to put ourselves out of a job, and that’s the point. If I can help people build communities - and move the impediments to human connection out of the way - then professionalized helping could be a thing of the past. The impediments are stigma, apathy, NIMBY-ism, and at the root…fear. When we start to lean towards our suffering community members instead of away from them I’ll know we’re there. That’s a dream I have - to be gainfully unemployed by the social services industrial complex.

Check the links on my page to get involved. Read the blog for information and inspiration. Get on the mailing list.

Let’s start spreading some justice.