Workshop at the Peoples' Social Forum 2014

CSCS and DUAL will co-host a workshop on grassroots organizing for supervised consumption sites at the 2014 Peoples’ Social Forum in Ottawa.

Time: Friday August 22 2014, 4:30-6pm
Location: Room 323 of Tabaret Hall, University of Ottawa

The Peoples’ Social Forum will be a key place to mobilize groups from various communities that advocate for the opening of safer consumptions sites for people who use drugs. In this workshop, we will share our experiences and strategize on how to push for safer consumption services across Canada.

The success of Insite in Vancouver BC, as well as the Supreme Court of Canada decision in 2011 to keep it open, should have led to the opening of more of these life saving services in other Canadian cities. Yet the moralization of safer consumption, and harm reduction services more broadly, continues to be an impediment to opening more legally sanctioned sites almost 3 years after the SCC decision. In this workshop, CSCS and DUAL will collaborate with other people organizing to open safer consumption sites and strategize on how to provide a diverse array of harm reduction services, which are accessible to everyone.

Following the work of the World Social Forum, the Peoples’ Social Forum is an opportunity for people of various communities to mobilize for social change. With over 500 workshops planned and thousands of participants from across the country expected, the PSF will be a place to share ideas both amongst people already working on similar issues and with people who are new to the work being presented, in our case harm reduction services.

Safer consumption, and harm reduction and community health more broadly, are important areas of discussion for the PSF. Political motivations and stigmatizing views of drugs and drug users perpetuate the use of the criminal legal system to punish people who use drugs. Although support for safer consumption is increasing, there are still many barriers to opening more sites like Insite. In this workshop we will share stories of how to campaign various political bodies and strategize on how to open safer consumption sites across Canada, which we will then take back to our respective communities.

Please join us at this event and help strategize on how to take action for harm reduction services that are accessible to everyone.