Southside Harm Reduction Services CI Report – Final

What has been most instrumenta to your progress?

Starting and Supporting Participant Meetings:

Our participants (largely people who use drugs) are core to everything that we do. Because Southside’s services are all outdoors there are many limitations to how much participants and staff can engage with each other about larger goals. Being able to offer a regular, flexible meeting space with snacks, food, bus fair, we have been able to do the following

-Meet, organize, share and learn about harm reduction/ OPC and share thoughts/ feelings about personal experiences.
-Held a reliable space for accessing resources, support, and connection to community.
-Planned food menu and activities for E Phillips block party (summer 2022) in partnership with Neighbors for Harm Reduction
-Shared OPC power point/other edu and heard feedback and discussed ideas for opening one in our city
-Strengthen/deepen relationships in a new capacity, beyond direct service

Neighbors for Harm Reduction Meeting:

In this last year we have worked to connect with the East Phillips Improvement Coalition (EPIC) and helped create an offshoot group to organize neighbors around harm reduction and overdose prevention centers. Some of the highlights of that work is below

-Built trust and relationships with neighbors by doing street clean up together
-Shared OPC edu with the group and helped create a vision for future goals/ process
-Regularly attend meetings
-Partnered in writing a concept paper about OPC in our community
-Partnered in connecting with local officials and sharing our vision with them
-Threw a successful community block party where SHRS tabled, served food and supported participant involvement

The offshoot group, neighbors for harm reduction, meets regularly and is a stand alone group now.

Along with this aspect is general partner and community meetings which has been core to building support for harm reduction, overdose prevention centers, and a community hub . Through these conversations we were able to connect groups and organizations with each other that has helped support a growing movement toward an OPC/drop in space.

NYC trip, connecting with programs across the country
Traveling and being able to support staff members visiting the first openly operating overdose prevention centers in the US was incredibly important because it helped us all see what was possible, gain a better understanding of what we are advocating for, and build connections to people that are willing to help us as we continue to work toward an OPC in MN. Hearing about their strategies and pathway to the

-Connected with OnPoint NYC to learn about their OPC and drop in spaces. OnPoint is the first overdose
-Connected with VOCAL NYC, a longstanding advocacy group that fought for the safety and rights of people living with HIV, people experiencing state violence, and drug users. They work in partnership with OnPoint and
-Connected with NEXT Distro
-We learned immensely from this trip and brought what we learned back to SHRS to help inform the work we’re doing as a community

This trip was extremely beneficial for our community coordinators and the work that they do in Minneapolis. Being able to really see what overdose prevention centers and organizing work can look like was inspiring and energizing.

Key lessons learned

The progress that we made took a lot of persistence. The biggest challenges that we faced were staying connected with participants, many of whom face daily barriers with communication technology, transportation, having basic needs met, etc. This roll called for us for us to be flexible with our goals and expectations of participants. Many people we work with do not have access to phones/mobile devices or reliable transportation. This meant that we had to be extremely reliable and resourceful in the ways we met and organized with folks.

Strategies that led to success were:
-Continuing to hold meetings even when attendance was low or nothing
-Encouraging and responding to feedback on how to make engagement more accessible (i.e. moving locations when necessary, where and when to get the word out, meeting people where they were at with information and support that was relevant to them).
– Encouraging engagement in various ways – surveys, meetings, outreach, ect
– Sharing food! And paying people or reimbursing people for their time

Southside received this funding when we first started hiring staff which led to many challenges/growing pains. We went from being a completely run volunteer organization to hiring more than 8 staff and not having much supervision and management experience. At the beginning of this funding, the combination of having staff who have never done this type of work before, with an overworked and admin staff with a lack of experience led to a lot of roadblocks. Some things that might be identified as failures were
Lack of support for staff lead to frustration and almost led to us letting some staff members go.
Largely due to inexperience and fear of failure we had delays in getting the project started and contributed to lack of staff leadership, exploration, and willingness to fail.
These failures and struggles led to some key lessons around the importance of well supported staff through leadership, management, training, and more (and budgeting for that support) as well as the importance of accountability and transparency around what the organization, staff, and leadership needs. Sitting with the staff periodically and intentionally to be clear about what is not working and what is needed

Reflections on the community innovation process

Inclusiveness has been the most important to completing our work – Southside harm reduction is built off of community support. We were volunteer run for the first 3 years and became the largest syringe exchange in the state because of volunteer work and people understanding the need of the work and the importance of what we do. We are both grateful and constantly surprised at the support that we get from community stakeholders. During this work some of the most exciting progress has been made in conjunction with neighborhood groups, participants, and the larger community. By being open with our goals, the needs that we see, and leading from behind we have been able to create a OPS study guide, supported a neighbors for harm reduction group to grow, and release audio interviews with participants around the needs that they have and share their experiences.

Being inclusive and thoughtful about our partnerships also builds trust with all stakeholders and has helped us build relationships with governmental partners, nonprofit partners, and others that are key to continuing this work. We have received support from a diverse group that will help[ move this work forward

Other key elements of Community Innovation

We are not sure if this counts but leading from behind and recognizing and working to uplift and acknowledge the strengths of the people and groups that we work with is key to any organizing and community process, especially working with marginalized communities. People who use drugs and people who live outside still face large amounts of stigma and are often treated with distrust in medical and many other settings. We recognize that people who use drugs care deeply about their own health and the health of their communities and that there are many complex social and environmental factors that PWUD have to navigate that do not always align with what doctors or others think should be individuals priorities. Supporting people where they are at and going from there has been essential to the work that we do not only with participants but the greater community, partners, and staff and volunteers too.

Progress toward an innovation

The work completed over the course of this grant has shown that Overdose Prevenion Centers are much more likely than originally thought. The amount of support that we have received from people at the city, the county, the state, in participants, and in the greater community has been overwhelming and shows that there is the possibility for a broad coalition that would support an OPC in Minneapolis when the time comes. That support combined with the opening of the first sites in the US by OnPoint in New York City and our subsequent visit has made the possibility of a Minneapolis OPC in the next 5 to 10 years a distinct possibility. Going to NYC and talking to some of the people a part of the OPCs helped us map out next steps and key partnerships to work on. These partnerships include some promising stakeholders including Mary Moriarty, Hennepin’s County Attorney, MN’s Attorney General, and City Council as well as some potentially supportive partners like the Mayor and his office.

While there feels like there has been significant progress towards an OPC in MN this work, at every step of the way, it has been clear that the needs of our participants are urgent and need to be addressed now, before an OPC would ever open. With overdose deaths rising year after year because of fentanyl and now likely Xylanzine and Benzo contaminated supply, continuation of the HIV outbreak, and increasing rates of houselessness new solutions are needed. Comprehensive solutions that recognize that our participants are full, complex, and beautiful humans – that acknowledge and provide services that address the complex needs that our participants face. Any solution, including a drop in space or an Overdose Prevention Center needs to offer comprehensive services.

What it will take to reach an innovation?

n/a

What’s next?

The next step to this project is working to address the complex and immediate needs of our participants while working to support participant engagement and action towards larger systems change. That looks like opening the Community Hub, building out programming inside of the space, and continuing to build community and institutional support for an overdose prevention center.

Something essential to that work that has us very excited is the participant group that we have been able to form through the work in this grant. We hope to continue to support that space and grow it into one, or multiple spaces, that support more in depth conversations around harm reduction, embracing the full spectrum of harm reduction – from managing drug use to abstinence, whatever the individual wants, to user groups, and more.
Yes

If you could do it all over again…

I feel like the most important change that we could have made is found ways to better support the Community Coordinators at the beginning of the grant. In the beginning of this project there was a lot of nervousness about trying new things and the confusion that comes with creating a new position at an organization. The community coordinators often defaulted to doing outreach and lower priority tasks leading to wheels spinning.

The community coordinators might identify this support as being told that they don’t need to bear the pressure of creating everything from scratch and that many of the pieces of this work already existed within and outside of the organization. I (their supervisor) might identify this as advice as offering the above support but also working with the coordinators to implement more accountability structures such as the monthly reports with SMART goals, putting more effort into looking for trainings, and taking more of a project oriented approach to this grant. I would also tell us to check out the Franklin library for meeting space with participants! All of this is would have helped us grow the participant meeting and find new ways to support PWUD in mpls