Policymakers, media, and the public often describe Canada as being in the grips of an “opioid crisis” or an “overdose crisis.” But the real roots of the crisis are bad drug policies grounded in racism and colonialism. We have an opportunity to undo the drug prohibition crisis, and cracks are slowly emerging in the War on Drugs, with police, prosecutors and politicians finally conceding that criminalizing people who use drugs does grave harm. But their parameters for drug decriminalization remain extraordinarily narrow. What does a civil society vision of drug decriminalization look like, and how do we get there?

Sunshine House is a community led organization which provides direct support to a number of groups. Operating within a harm reduction model, and led by community members, the folks representing Sunshine House will discuss:

• Immigration, Housing, EIA

• Facilitating Community-STBBI Events

• Vaccines/Medical Harm Reduction Models

My talk will discuss historical changes within the Winnipeg 2SLGBTQ+ community, describe our current situation, and look to the future with Rainbow Resource Centre's Place of Pride housing project. The historical segment will look to complicate the way that 2SLGBTQ+ history captures historical harm reduction practices within the community as well as how particular framings of that history replicate contemporary harm.

Charlie Eau will speak from their lived experience as a neurodivergent, genderqueer, nonmonogamous parent raising two baby queers and one shockingly normal pre-teen. Let's talk about the ways that we abolish oppressive power while being rudely interrupted by worldwide pandemics, calling 911 because your 8-year-old is stuck in a baby swing at the park, and just wanting to stare at memes for a second. Queer care (and memes) as harm reduction.

I’ll review our current approaches to talking with youth on substance use from a harm reduction lens. SERC’s youth team works with young folks across Manitoba in a variety of settings including high schools, community programs, and incarcerated youth. This means we encounter folks with a wide range of levels of use from none to lots. We believe in offering strengths-based accurate information in a fun and non-judgemental way builds healthier communities for all. 

Jamie will introduce the recent partnership between the Manitoba Harm Reduction Network, Wilfrid Laurier University, The University of Winnipeg, and The Link: Youth and Family Supports on a community-based research project Art as Knowledge Mobilization: Amplifying Youth Voices to Inform Harm Reduction Practice for Preventing Youth Homelessness. Funded by Making the Shift Youth Homelessness Social Innovation Lab, the first stage of this project includes a literature review and environmental scan exploring youth-focused harm reduction policies and practices, locally and globally. Jamie will share initial findings related to youth-focused harm reduction, and introduce the next steps of the project, which seeks to amplify the voices of youth to remove barriers and better position youth-serving organizations to meet the needs of youth through harm reduction policy and practice.

Will speak to Huddle Ka Ni Kanichihk's core services and how Harm Reduction is embedded in program delivery.

Between grossly outdated curricula and the far right trying to obliterate youth rights, the state of sex education these days (like many other things) can feel a little- well, bleak. As an eternal optimist (at times annoyingly so), I want to explore how building 2STLGBQIA+ centred, anti-racist and pleasure positive sex education practices can reduce the harm of problematic sex ed and create possibilities for radical transformation.

To Be Announced

We are not meant to do this work alone. Our radical acts of collective care, revolutionary love and solidarity are not only required for our sustainability, but necessary to create spaces to reimagine ourselves and our world in liberatory ways.We will reconsider how professionalism, capitalism and psychology have blamed workers and the people they work alongside for the harms in the work : Obscuring the structural and targeted abandonment and necropolitics that are the heart of our despair. We will look to the transformative work of believed-in-hope as a possibility, and our collective commitments to shoulder each other up, to refuse to abandon anybody, as we continue our well worn paths as shit disturbers.

Moms Stop The Harm is a National group across Canada.
We have over 3000 members.
We offer support, education and we advocate.
We advocate for a Harm Reduction.
And every day we fight for a safer supply of all substances.
One of the ways we bring attention to our cause is through visual art.
Today we are launching our Purple Poppy art display.
The poppies represent our loved ones Gone Too Soon.
We are writing messages on the poppies to our loved ones and then they will be placed on a white board in the shape of a river.
The river is an ever-ending flow of loved ones gone from a toxic street supply.
They are floating to Ottawa to demand our government's do more.

My hope is that this memory art project will be done national, and all of our boards with our messages, will be put together in one long line.
And if all goes well, they will go to Ottawa next October for the Harm Reduction Conference.
In Manitoba someone dies every day.
We have to be loud and we have to show everyone that this can happen to you.
These poppies, show what we live with every day.
Our messages show our pain.
and our undying love for those gone from preventable deaths.