Harm Reduction

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Harm Reduction

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To effectively support young people engaging in substance use, YWHO partnered with Lumenus Community Services with the aim of building harm reduction capacity amongst service providers within YWHO sites.

To lay the foundation of this capacity development initiative, Lumenus facilitated a series of webinars that are shared on this page. The purpose of these webinars is to provide participants with an introduction to harm reduction and how to incorporate it into their workplace

Webinar #1:

Harm Reduction 101 – Exploring the language, levels and roots of harm reduction philosophy and practice. We anticipate that service providers of different areas and backgrounds are likely to have different interpretations of harm reduction, depending on their priority, population and the resources available. This will require a group discussion to begin to create a collective understanding of harm reduction, and our own particular capacity to reduce harm.
Harm Reduction & Youth Mental Health – Examining the correlation between harm reduction and youth mental health, while being mindful of factors such as age, consent, bias and accessibility play a role in service delivery

Webinar #2:

Spectrum of Harm Reduction – Viewing harm reduction in the framework of a spectrum. A more in depth consideration of how agencies and service providers uniquely engage with harm reduction practices, and assessing where they fit across a range of possibilities for reducing harm. For example, each agency will have to consider their individual capacity to adopt harm reduction practices. At one end of the spectrum, agencies may implement the philosophy of harm reduction as an approach to care, with little change in the services they provide. Others may decide that they will be implementing more intensive harm reduction services, such as distributing harm reduction supplies or providing space for safer use. There are many factors that will need to be considered, such as how an agency is funded, the population they work with, and the needs of the community. Identifying where an agency falls in the spectrum of harm reduction allows these questions to arise, so solutions can follow.
Policy & Legal Considerations – Bringing awareness and education with regards to how policies and law may inhibit or enforce your harm reduction goals. For example, what is in an agency’s policies regarding substance use and clients? Is your client aware of their age of consent?

Webinar 3 (audio recording):

Lumenus’s Capacity Building Model (in a nutshell) – Introducing how the model was implemented at Lumenus to build harm reduction capacity, highlighting the different steps and how agencies can use this model to guide their own capacity-building efforts.
Assessing Needs of Staff & Youth – Building from all the areas of focus during the webinars, walking participants through what a needs assessment would look like for their staff and the youth they work with. Offering Lumenus’s Capacity Building Model as a guide and resource to begin assessing their immediate service gaps, community needs and harm reduction priorities.

Webinar 4:

Best Practices/How to Work with Peer Workers – Honing in on a key pillar of Lumenus’s Capacity Building Model with harm reduction and youth: peer workers. What peer workers do, how to start or continue working with peers, and why they are essential to harm reduction. *This workshop is be led by peer youth workers.

Slides from Webinar 1: