Welcome to the Cardea Conversations podcast! Cardea Conversations will explore emerging topics in the field and delve deeper into discussions of particular importance to the communities in which we work.
Our first episode focuses on substance use and harm reduction: Part 1 frames the issue and provides critical context, while Part 2 further explores harm reduction and options for those looking to change their relationship to substances. Listen in for valuable insights on language, stigma, and community wisdom from Mar Kidvai Padilla, LMSW, MSEd, CHWI, and Sarah Orton, Senior Training Managers, moderated by Melanie Ogleton, MHSA, MPH, Chief Strategy Officer. Additional resources can be found below.
Rethinking How to Approach Substance Use Conversations, Part 1
Transcript of Part 1:
Melanie Ogleton:
Welcome to our Cardea Conversations podcast, where we explore topics and areas that are important to us in the communities with which we work. My name is Melanie Ogleton, Chief Strategy Officer at Cardea, and thank you for joining us as we dive into insightful conversations with 2 of our amazing senior training managers focused on substance, use, and the intersection of harm reduction, Mar Padilla and Sarah Orton.
We look forward to engaging in dialogue that honors those before us, and those currently engaged in work to address a myriad of intersecting issues associated with substance, misuse, and in ways that keep community and people at the center.
Mar and Sarah will share insights, stories and experiences around the latest trends in the substance use and harm reduction space. So, whether you’re here to learn, grow, or simply engage with us on today’s topic, we are happy that you’ve tuned in and hope that you leave with knowledge, information, and perspectives.
Who is Cardea? We are a national women of color led organization with more than 50 years of experience in social impact evaluation, policy advancement, capacity development, and professional learning. We envision a world in which optimal health and well-being, equity, and justice are realities for all communities, and our mission is to address complex program policy and systems issues by co-creating solutions that center community strengths and wisdom.
As a woman of color led organization, we lean into our team’s life experiences and understand the impact of historical, systemic, structural, and institutional issues on health, economic, and social conditions. You’ll see this show up in our various conversations, where we’ll have real discussion around topics that are of interest to our organization’s vision and mission.
So, let’s get started. So, Mar and Sarah, thank you for joining me today. Let’s start by having you all tell us a bit about you and what brings you to this conversation.
Sarah Orton:
Thanks, Melanie. My name’s Sarah. I use she/her pronouns. I’m a senior training manager at Cardea. I’ve been engaging in activism and organizing and working in community since my teens, primarily doing a lot of anti-war organizing, working on issues, feminist issues, and reproductive justice and harm reduction, even though a lot of us didn’t have the language to describe what it was that we were doing back then. Yeah. I think this is one of those topics where our personal experiences so heavily influence our perspective, as they should. And so for me, a lot of what that looks like is growing up in communities and still belonging to communities of people who use drugs, people who are disproportionately impacted by overdose, in a state, sometimes, of constant and perpetual grief, and also trying to leverage some of those experiences into the frameworks and language, and, I don’t know, the ways that we come to this issue in more professionalized and public health spaces as well.
Melanie Ogleton:
Thank you, Sarah, for that. Really appreciate how you’ve shown up in the ways that you mentioned and look forward to learning more. Mar?
Mar Padilla:
Yes, my name is Mar Padilla. I use they/them pronouns, and I’m a senior training manager at Cardea Services. Like Sarah, I have some lived experience, but mine is much more limited. I came into harm reduction more professionally from having provided HIV and hepatitis C testing and counseling services, which came about after I was an LGBTQ community justice organizer. So I understand the way that many people come to this work through professional spheres, through public health, through social work, and I think it’s really crucial that especially those of us who don’t have as much experience with friends who are passing from overdose and communities that are grieving, that we take leadership from those of us who do have those experiences. So, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in this realm, but it is something that’s really close to my heart, that I’m really passionate about. I was an intern at Vocal New York that does amazing work, and then I became a senior harm reduction counselor at the New York Harm Reduction Educators in East Harlem. Went back to study social work where I also did an internship at Austin Harm Reduction Coalition and continue to be involved in harm reduction efforts, both for political reasons but also for personal reasons. The people that I live and love with are drug users and people who have been in the sex trades, and so it’s personal and professional for me now.
Melanie Ogleton:
Thank you, Mar. That is an amazing testament, amazing background, and again, likewise, thank you for bringing those experiences to today’s discussion. You both mentioned a range of people that touch on this issue and in different ways, and I mentioned at the start that this is relevant for people that are working professionally in substance use and recovery spaces as well as people that just have a direct or indirect connection to the conversation. But from your perspective, and as we move forward, who are we speaking to right now?
Sarah Orton:
Yeah, people who are directly impacted either by grief, loss, substance use, directly or through people that they love, impacted by bad policy, the war on drugs, all of it, really see themselves and their experiences reflected in the conversations that we have, and we’re not just having conversations about people that are not accessible to those people. And as someone who is immersed in the professional culture, I think that that means do our best to be mindful of the jargon and the frameworks that we use to talk about people’s lives. But for me, the hope is always yes, of course people who are working in these spaces professionally, but also people who are just living life and not typically the people being talked to in these conversations.
Melanie Ogleton:
Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for adding that historical context. It’s really important, and we know from our three respective experiences in this space that the harm reduction conversations in the initial work around substance use and even acknowledging recovery, and recovery is a very personal journey, was messy. I still have a hard time as a Black person with the term, and we’ll get into terminology in a bit, but the war on drugs. That’s traumatizing to me to even say that term because it decimated Black families and it continues to, that term in context continues to be used to decimate Black families. And so, I do think we come to this with different triggers, so to speak, and yeah, appreciate, look forward to taking a dive even into how we use the words and the framing around this topic. Mar, anything to add around who are we speaking to today?
Mar Padilla:
I think really Sarah hit it on the head. We want to speak to people who are both professionally involved and personally involved in harm reduction and in the movements to take care of each other really.
Melanie Ogleton:
Thanks Mar. And so, I said that we would come back to language and terminology and that’s important in our respective roles here at Cardea by centering language, words, terminology that we want to elevate and show up in conversation and words that we want to avoid. I think it’s important that we pause for a bit and talk some about the terms that people will hear and will show up in our discussion versus those that they’re likely not to hear as we move forward. Any thoughts on language, terminology and words as we move forward?
Sarah Orton:
I will preface this by saying that I am a person who loves language, who loves words, and as a person who really loves language and really loves just finding the right or the best way to say something, there are a lot of terms in this work that I don’t love or that I only love in certain contexts or that I feel like are really loaded. I think coming to this conversation, of course we talk about this in sex-ed and reproductive justice spaces and LGBTQ + activism spaces like de-stigmatizing language is essential for any population that’s heavily stigmatized. One of the ways that we can, I think reduce a little bit of the stigma and substance use is staying away from terms that are highly stigmatizing, and I think these are becoming more outdated every day, but where it’s addict or abuser or even drug abuse or using words like clean or dirty to describe people’s drug use status or even to describe injection equipment or whatever the case may be.
I think always it is good to use neutral language. We can describe the behavior that we’re talking about without using this really values laden language to talk about it. Perhaps a little bit more controversial is that for me, myself personally, I do not love words like disease or disordered. I find it a little bit offensive or activating when people that I don’t know or don’t know well use these terms to describe my own history with substances, for example. I will say that with the caveat, that’s a personal thing and some people really, really deeply relate to this framing. And usually when we encounter that kind of tension or schism, I would consider that being in-group terminology or insider language, basically meaning that it’s okay for people to use this language if they’re using it to describe their own experiences, but don’t go around applying these terms to people you don’t know whose behaviors you aren’t fully familiar with. Or even if you are, without knowing how that person defines and describes their own experiences,
Melanie Ogleton:
Right, Sarah, like, ask, right? At the end of the day, it’s ask what’s preferred. And I think we, of course, you’re in public health and you love a terminology, and you love a framework. We just do, right? We just love a framework, we love a terminology, but at the end of the day, it’s leaning into that community again, that community voice, wisdom and perspective. And I think you nailed that so perfectly. Thank you for that.
Sarah Orton:
Yeah, yeah, totally. Just ask or just be intuitive and mirror people’s language. Be careful about how you’re applying umbrella terms. I feel similarly about words like recovery and relapse. Again, recovery is a really big spectrum if that’s framing that you use at all. Are we talking about abstinence? Are we talking about moderation management? Are we talking about other forms of self-managed use? Also, just because somebody has changed their relationship with drugs or alcohol, or other substances doesn’t necessarily mean that they consider themselves as being recovered. This is sort of another arm of the disorder/disease framing. And so, for this conversation, I think that we’ll be using terms that are neutral and specific. We like to describe the behavior instead of using a little bit more of loaded umbrella terms. So, if we’re talking about abstinence, we’ll say abstinence instead of recovery. Thank you.
Melanie Ogleton:
Mar, anything to add to that?
Mar Padilla:
Yes. I’m thinking about how I’m not really interested in preventing substance use or even misuse as much as I am the harms that can come because of legal, social, and health related consequences. And so sure, for some people using substances, for example, using crystal meth for three days in a row can cause somebody to have psychosis and people can want to avoid that. At the same time. That is a much talked about issue, the personal and health related harms of drug use, but often what’s missing is the bigger picture, the structures, how the war on drugs, as you mentioned, created boogeyman of crack users, particularly Black mothers. And this notion of crack babies to decimate entire communities, particularly Black communities, brown communities. And so, when we’re talking about language, it also locates us within power and within histories. So, something else I try to avoid is saying things like “high-risk people” or “high-risk populations”, and instead say “communities that are disproportionately burdened by the war on drugs” or “by HIV”; “people put at risk”; “made vulnerable” because it points back to the socioeconomic and political power and history of colonization and systemic deprivation, from which that power was derived.
Melanie Ogleton:
Yeah, those are good points. And I think as we acknowledged in the beginning that what we are talking about really is the intersectionality of multiple issues, issues of social determinants of equity, layered on top of issues of social determinants of health, all linking back to systems of racism and oppression. And that makes today’s topic extremely and deeply personal for us for different ways. We’re coming to this discussion from deeply personal perspectives, some of which all the three of us have shared already. And I also think the way you all are sharing or that there are numerous pathways for a person that’s interested in changing their relationship with substances. It doesn’t have to blame them or put them at the center, but when we think about the accessibility and the comprehensive support for that person, what are the options? We could take a step back and just unpack for a bit some of the options that are available to support people, but then there’s also this added layer of how do we ensure the accessibility and the comprehensiveness and that support. So, it’s a two-part question that you all can go take any direction that you want.
Sarah Orton:
Oh, the options. I mean, of course we have our abstinence-based group of 12 step models. We have AA and NA of course, and so many different iterations and even spinoff groups on that, even some that are not abstinence based, that are “12 steppy”, but also include more of a moderation management approach or a self-managed use approach. There’s also medication assisted treatment, which I think is good. Methadone, suboxone, those kinds of things, which I think is kind of an interesting, people don’t necessarily love to talk about it this way, but it’s kind of an interesting converging of harm reduction with sort of the goal of abstinence or the convergence of recovery models and harm reduction models; which I don’t see as being at odds with each other, but that’s a side tangent. And then of course, we’re talking about, or we would be remiss not to talk about harm reduction services, including syringe service programs, including wide, deep, deep naloxone or Narcan saturation, sterile supplies – I mean so many.
The majority of harm reduction programs are out there doing street-based outreach. And in addition to providing sterile, unused supplies, depending on the route of administration, people are out there providing sexual health supplies and basic needs supplies and referral connection. And anyway, there’s so many different pathways and I think that we really limit ourselves when we don’t provide people with the full menu of options and really just unbiased education about each option that’s available. I think connection and relationship is so, so important, it’s really just at the center of this work and that people are more receptive to connecting with you when you acknowledge them as the experts of their own experiences. Something that I’ve heard Shira Hassan say, who literally wrote the book on liberatory harm reduction, is that everybody is all about self-determination until it’s an answer that you don’t like. And that’s something that, that’s a…
Melanie Ogleton:
Good one, Sarah. It’s so true. It’s so true.
Sarah Orton:
It’s so true. And I think we’ve all seen it. Those of us that have worked in provider spaces, we’ve seen it. Those of us who have ever gone to the doctor have probably seen it, right? There’s so many ways in which that shows up. And so, something that I think it can be useful to remind oneself of that when working with others.
Melanie Ogleton:
Yeah, so true. And I went through it immediately in my mind, the myriad of times where I’m like, yes, I’m all about my path, my path, until someone tells me about myself. And I’m like, well, you don’t know my path. So, it’s like, yeah, you don’t know. How do you know? But anyway, yeah, we could do a whole other podcast on that and unpacking that, but thank you. Thank you, Sarah. Mar, anything to add to this part of our discussion?
Mar Padilla:
Yeah, I really, really like what Sarah said, and I’ve heard the phrase, “the opposite of addiction is connection” used. And there are a lot of people who have adopted that philosophy and others who’ve critiqued it with good reason. But I think focusing only on making sure that people have Narcan, which is now very popular, is so, so important and really limited if we’re not also looking at the big picture. And so, if we’re not decriminalizing drugs, if we’re not decriminalizing sex work, then the harms that the state causes are not going to be addressed. So, I think harm reduction can also, or part of the paths can look like advocacy work to change laws and policies. And obviously indigenous communities are not a monolith, but there’s a way of talking about medicine for a lot of Native nations that understand it differently from just a pharmaceutical that you would be prescribed by a doctor. But medicine can be laughter, medicine can be family, medicine can be community and children and connection. And so, I think about that a lot as well.
Melanie Ogleton:
Yeah, that’s a good one. Thank you for bringing up that perspective. What feeds your soul, right? What feeds you from the perspectives that are important to you or that person? Thank you both for your expertise. To our listeners, please join us for part two where we will continue our discussion.
Rethinking How to Approach Substance Use Conversations, Part 2
Transcript of Part 2:
Melanie Ogleton:
Welcome to our Cardea Conversations podcast, where we explore topics and areas that are important to us in the communities with which we work. My name is Melanie Ogleton, Chief Strategy Officer at Cardea. We will continue our insightful conversation with our senior training managers, Mar Padilla and Sarah Orton, exploring substance use and the intersection of harm reduction. In part one, we discussed our experience with the topic, terminology, and ways to center people and communities in conversation and planning. We’ll continue our insightful conversations by taking a deeper look at harm reduction principles and honor the history and legacy of the harm reduction movement. Mar and Sarah, welcome back.
You both have mentioned harm reduction in previous responses, and so let’s just go there. Let’s go there for a minute. We know that harm reduction, really, it was grassroots organizing. It was communities protecting their people and in ways that acknowledged personal experiences. So, if we think about now, harm reduction has a strategy at the federal level. It is now being discussed in circles where before you couldn’t even say the H word in many policy circles at the national, state and local levels. So, if we think about harm reduction from a capital H “Harm Reduction” and a lowercase “harm reduction”, what do you all see? …Does that even make sense? And what do you all see as a difference in application between that capital H “Harm Reduction” and the lowercase “harm reduction”? Or did I just make that up?
Sarah Orton:
Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I paused for a minute to think. Yeah, I think the people who coin the terms or use the terms capital H and lower case h harm reduction would define it as capital H Harm Reduction referring to the overall, the social movement aspect, the shifting of power and resources, and real actual power and real meaningful ways, back to the communities that are most impacted. Lowercase harm reduction is kind of like, more the tools [of a] public health framework or public health approach that it really tends to be a little bit more about service provision – with good reason, right? It’s not that that’s not useful. We are all operating under a great sense of urgency here, but it’s kind of more concerned with the here and now rather than really examining the roots around why services are needed, and also disrupting the conditions that led to the need for those services in the first place.
When I think, I mean for me personally, when I think about capital H Harm Reduction, I think about, of course, it’s always important to honor the legacy of the fact that this term, this framework came from communities of drug users. However, I think its application is super useful in so many different contexts where we are trying to reduce harm, where we are trying to create better health outcomes for people. I think harm reduction really has its roots in being reality-based, that we’re doing in the moment what we need to do to survive and keep people safe rather than pushing towards one particular outcome. And I think that it’s useful for the way that we think about sexual and reproductive health. I think it’s useful for the way that we think about youth in the sex trades. I think that it’s useful for thinking about self-harm and self-injury and so many different frameworks that public health has struggled to effectively address for so many years.
I think also just the tension here is something that I think about and talk with people about all the time, I think it’s really a tension worth exploring and unpacking: is that public health or the government, the government capital G “Government” got involved because of so many decades of activism and organizing and begging for the powers that be to fund harm reduction and health and to pay attention and to do something and to respond to what was quickly becoming a widespread public health crisis. And we have to do that. That’s almost always what we have to do. But in every other social movement space that I’ve worked in– I have a background in sexual violence, worked in rape crisis for many years – and we saw similar patterns there too, where you’re advocating for funding, you’re advocating for public health and government support, and then you start to get it. And then some of the movement work becomes co-opted, or depoliticized, or reframed to make palatable to the people with power and resources and money. So, this isn’t something that is newer, specific production, but also just quite important to name and acknowledge too.
Melanie Ogleton:
Yeah, I mean we’ve seen that in so many ways, right? We’ve seen that on the HIV side where there was really communities organizing because they saw their people dying, they saw families, friends, those near them dying and something needed to be done. The same things happened on the harm reduction side. These grassroots organizing efforts that have really had an impact on the reason why harm reduction or the reason why Ryan White, the reason why HIV and other public health issue areas have been elevated to national stages. Really, we have to acknowledge and appreciate the grassroots organizing. So how do we honor that legacy in this as harm reduction trends in national spaces? How do we ensure that we honor the legacy of grassroots organizing while [we] continue to advocate for government and public health approaches to reducing the impacts of substance use?
Mar Padilla:
I think one way we do that is by looking at history and so, not erasing the contributions to harm reduction or sort of a “proto- harm reduction”, maybe before that term exactly was being used for communities taking care of themselves and each other (and others outside of the community), while resisting oppression. And so, I think about the Black Panther Party’s free-breakfast program for youth. I think about the Young Lords, who created mobile vans and went around serving mostly Puerto Rican communities, and how Act Up began some of the early syringe exchange in New York City. And now [free breakfast,] mobile vans, syringe exchange (though it’s not legal all over the country) these are things that a lot of people in public health have become really familiar with and affirming of. But there are other methods of harm reduction that are still on the fringe.
And so, I’m thinking a lot about Overdose Prevention Centers and OnPoint, which is a mix of the Washington Heights Corner Project and the New York Harm Reduction Educators, is a leader in OPCs sometimes called “safe injection facilities”.
And it’s not legal to have an overdose prevention center where people can go in and use drugs in a way that is going to be monitored in a way that if there’s an overdose, death can be prevented. And you can actually go to opcinfo.org and get a tour of an overdose prevention center. I recently did that and I was so impressed with not only the range of services provided for injection drug users, but they have an inhalation room, where people can smoke, because people are overdosing more from inhalation. And so, this is very controversial. It wouldn’t be shocking if the city of New York or the state of New York or the federal government shuts it down because it’s not exactly sanctioned. But these are exactly the ways in which I can imagine in 20 years there being public health and social work and medical industrial complex support for such spaces.
So, honoring the legacy and the history, and seeing what are people doing today (that isn’t fully accepted) that we can expand on. And I know that Sarah mentioned Shira Hassan, and I’ve heard her speak about liberatory harm reduction and really bring in the history of the Janes, for example, in Chicago who were helping (probably a variety of people who were pregnant), but I think at the time they were talking about “women” who were pregnant access abortion services before Roe v. Wade decriminalized it. I’ve heard of her talk about providing clean razors for girls and young women who are in the sex trades and in street economies and who are also doing controlled self-injury, where they understand bodily autonomy to include the ability to self-injure, to do a number of different things: stop dissociating, get in touch with their body, have some control over pain – for whatever reason – people are doing things that are dangerous or stigmatized.
It’s important that those of us who are not engaging in that behavior, don’t let our discomfort stop us from supporting the things that are going to make a real material impact in people’s lives. And I really like the phrase “people closest to the problem are closest to the solution”. The end of that (that a lot of people haven’t heard) is, “but furthest from power and resources”. So those of us who do have power and resources professionally, academically, through our networks, need to make sure that we’re leveraging that to make sure that we are following the leadership of people most impacted.
Melanie Ogleton:
That’s powerful. That’s a powerful statement that “people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, but furthest from power and resources”. I mean, talk about a Word, but you all have said something in previous, and I have to go here, and it may be provocative, controversial, what have you, but harm reduction models and recovery/abstinence models have been pitted against each other in some ways, right? But from your perspectives, are they inherently at odds with each other and depending on how you go with that, if so, in what ways can we reconcile this?
Sarah Orton:
No, not at odds with each other. Next question. Just kidding! Of course, sometimes (often), people make it this way in application, but philosophically, no, of course not. If we are putting autonomy and self-determination at the center, and people are able to have all of the resources, and information, and whatever it is that they need to decide what suits them best in that moment, I just think it can be such a myth that you kind of have to choose one path or the other, as if – something that Shira also says all the time is that, “change and healing is not linear”. But I think it really applies to this part of the question as well. It’s totally a myth that you have to choose one path or the other, and that life and healing aren’t nuanced and complex, and that we can’t move between different times and space, and go back and forth between what’s needed in that moment, even if that changes from day to day or hour to hour.
I mean, that’s very, I think “12 step framing” right there, maybe. But yeah, I think one of the ways that we can reconcile is, I think both groups maybe need to do a little bit of stretching. I think that something that I would really like to see in more of the abstinence-based spaces is really trying to broaden our understanding of what recovery is. We talked about this a little bit at the beginning. I think that because this is kind of the principles that 12 Step and abstinence models were founded on, is that recovery meant full abstinence, all the time, from all substances. I think we are learning all the time, and perhaps it is becoming more widely accepted. I’m not sure people are complicated, that substance use is complicated. For example, just wanting to change your relationship with one type of substance doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be repeating that exact behavior with all substances. Just doesn’t work like that. So yeah, just people being a little bit more comfortable with those tensions and expanding what they think they know based on their own personal experiences.
Melanie Ogleton:
Absolutely. Sarah, very personal journey and personal experiences. Anything to add to that?
Mar Padilla:
Yeah, I think Sarah’s already pointed this out, but the ways in which often the abstinence-only communities and folks locate the biggest harms from drug use as being personal, and the way a lot of harm reduction communities point to State violence, interpersonal violence experienced by the hands of the State. So, if you’re taken away to a jail or a prison because of your drug use or the drug trade, it’s going to make an enormous impact in your life that is going to converge in a way that it’s impossible to separate out the harms experienced personally, from the State.
And so I’ve had friends who’ve used drugs who I have told, if you want to go to a meeting because you want to manage your own use, know that AA and NA, they’re all over the place because they’re often held in churches, (which for some really dark historical reasons) churches are ubiquitous. But that there are these free spaces run by peers who are sharing their experiences. You don’t have to buy into the entire model. You can be critical of the Christian origins, some of chauvinist origins of these 12 step models and still get a lot out from being with other people who are sharing their experiences and working to mitigate harms. So, there’s definitely a way in which there’s no clear and cut differentiation to be made, but definitely some expansion to be had philosophically and politically.
Melanie Ogleton:
Thank you. Mar. I think we are at a good place where we’ve hit on a number of issues both standalone and intersecting, and I want to bring it home now. And if you were to think of two things that you want our listeners to take away from today’s discussion, what would they be?
Sarah Orton:
We’ve talked a lot in this conversation about the various tensions and contradictions that are present in this work and that are present in all work that is highly intersectional and personal and experiential. I think it would be a mistake to shy away from this. I think that we should lean into the contradictions and the nuance and have these conversations. The first time when we were talking about this before, off recording, Mar had said the way that we honor legacies is by “continuing to dream”. And that was just such a sweet reminder that I’ve thought about so many times since. And so I wanted it to be said for the recording, at least in some capacity, because I think that that goes hand in hand with the idea that we can lean into the contradictions, that we can grow, and that growth and discomfort, I think is often where some of the most impactful work happens.
Melanie Ogleton:
Absolutely. Thank you. Sarah. Mar, what are your two takeaways that you would like for folks to leave with?
Mar Padilla:
Well, thank you so much, Sarah, for bringing that back up here, because I do think dreaming is really key. And so, we have to dream radically. I imagine a world where people can go and obtain drugs on a sliding scale from the government that is clear what those drugs are, and they’re not mixed with things that people aren’t expecting. That’s a really radical idea. And one that I think honors the legacy of harm reduction. I think also uplifting the voices of the people doing this work, for me: the National Harm Reduction Coalition defined uppercase, H, Harm Reduction, lowercase h, harm reduction, and have been really critical.
And it makes me think about the “babies in the river” analogy, which is a very strong parable highlighting the importance of addressing immediate needs while also seeking long-term solutions. And it sounds like this (I think I first heard Saul Alinsky use it, and he is a big organizer):
Two people are walking by a river, and they see babies floating down. One person jumps in to save the babies while the other runs upstream. The person who jumps in to save the babies, asks the person who ran upstream, “Where are you going? We have to save these babies!” And the person who’s running upstream replies, “I’m going to see who’s throwing babies in the river!”
And like I said, it’s a very strong analogy, but it really shows what’s at stake. We are drowning and we need to make sure that people are being pulled out of the river, at the same time as we make sure that people aren’t being thrown in! So really uplifting legacies and individuals/groups, and dreaming.
Melanie Ogleton:
And on that note, what a powerful way to conclude this portion of our podcast. And you all have said some really powerful statements from others, from your own experiences that I wish we can capture and put into a book of some sort because they’re motivating, but they’re also extremely contextual-setting and powerful in ways that demonstrate how communities both are hurting, but are also the source of strength in their own solutions. And that we need to do more to elevate and hope that we do some of that through our discussions, that will continue.
I want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and thank you, Mar and Sarah, for your deep and insightful perspectives and experiences. And again, whether you were here to learn, grow, or engage, we hope that you’re walking away with new knowledge, information, perspectives, and really appreciate you listening in and joining us for today’s discussion. Thank you.
Additional Resources
- Harm Reduction Hacks
- Honoring our History: The LGBTQ+ and Black Roots of the Harm Reduction Movement
- Next Distro Resource Library
- National Harm Reduction Coalition Resource Library
- Overdose Prevention Center Virtual Tour
- Saving our Own Lives: Shira Hassan’s Book Launch Video
- Seven Key State-Level Strategies for Supporting Community-Level Harm Reduction
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