Our Mission
Our Mission: To educate, empower and advocate for the health and dignity of Metro-Denver’s injection drug users and affected partners in accordance with harm reduction principles.
We extend our deepest gratitude to our community of supporters. With their help, we are able to forward our vision and continue to meet the social and public health needs of Denver’s Injection Drug User (IDU) community.
The Harm Reduction Action Center continues society's goal to reach the most marginalized, create community where there is not, and help the most lost find a direction home.
Anyone who has been inflicted with or affected by addiction knows that drug use is a complex, multi-faceted issue; reducing personal harm associated with injection drug use is particularly complex. Injection Drug Users (IDU) often experience chronic homelessness, unemployment, incarceration, poor mental/physical health, discrimination, and trauma histories.
We were the focus of the Harm Reduction Coalitions weekly podcast!
The Harm Reduction Action Center has been a staple of drug user health in Denver for a number of years. Recent law changes mean that it can soon commence syringe exchange. Download the interview with our HRAC staff Lisa Raville and Ruth Kanatser or 
find the HRC Podcast on i-Tunes.
Join Giving First and Colorado community supporters donating to the Harm Reduction Action Center until December 7, 2011. Please join us in our efforts.
The HRAC has cultivated and guided clients through many activities of self advocacy including the victorious passing of SB 10-189, giving Colorado public health workers the possibility of legal protection to exchange clean syringes for potentially contaminated ones.
The Harm Reduction Action Center has had many successes over the past twelve months. Basic needs of our clients are met in a homelike and non-competitive environment. We provide confidential HIV and HCV testing, prevention education, and risk management. Among 1,300 individuals, we average 35 new clients per month. Counseling was provided to more than 600 clients and 121 clients received medical services and health insurance application assistance. Collaborating with the Stout Street mobile clinic, we assisted an additional 40 clients per month and collected an additonal 16,000 syringes from IDUs. On site psychotherapy and substance abuse counseling was utilized by 60 clients. An estimated 65 clients received substance abstinence treatment, planning and substance treatment enrollment assistance (including methadone maintenance) while more than 200 safe injection kits and 400 condoms are distributed per month.
Nationally, 125 health service providers learned new approaches to improve the medical relationships with IDU patients through HRAC educational sessions. The STRIVE program is a six session class aimed at reducing HIV/HCV transmission risk through the cultivation of peer educators, 75 participants graduated. Break the Cycle works to reduce the number of new injectors. Of last years 98 participants, 72% reported higher efficacy in refusing injection initiation requests. An IDU Advisory Committee is a forum in which IDUs reflect on common concerns, creating a sense of community in a culture that is often distrustful and lonely, an average of 34 participants attend monthly. More than 85 IDUs shared decision making and took ownership of a community based research project regarding the IDU community and its fostered relationships, the syringe exchange and violence against the homeless.
How We Respond to the Public Health Needs of the IDU
1. Provide IDUs with relevant skills, education and behaviors that reduce the harmful effects of marginalized lifestyles on the individual and the larger public.
2. Decrease HIV, HCV and other drug-related health conditions by providing legal harm reduction supplies.
3. Empower Denver IDUs to advocate and participate in social change issues of their interest including homelessness, alleviation of poverty, healthcare needs, incarceration re-entry, and access to clean syringes**
4. Expand awareness and access to health services to diverse IDU groups, particularly through the use of client peer-educators
5. Educate and advocate for Colorado political leaders to garner a position on a community syringe exchange program**
6. Increase access and utilization of available medical services for IDUs who are stigmatized by adverse social or health conditions while advising health care providers in best practices
**Please check out some local coverage of syringe exchange issues in Denver:
Needles exchange program, becoming moral issue for Colorado.
Why doesn't Colorado get the point of needle exchange programs?
Needle exchanges will benefit public health.
Will Colorado include the homeless in hate crime legislation?
Denver's first legal needle exchange on horizon.
City council approves making Denver ordinance allowing them more flexible.
Clean needles save lives.
Denver to offer syringe exchange program.
How we use your donation?
The Harm Reduction Action Center depends completely on donations from individuals, organizations and foundations to provide basic necessities, legal harm reduction and wound care supplies, health intervention incentives, safe syringe disposal. Without your support we could not exist.
Thank you!
Clean supplies
Food for Clients
Principles of Harm Reduction
Brought to you by www.HarmReduction.org
Harm reduction is a set of practical strategies that reduce negative consequences of drug use, incorporating a spectrum of strategies from safer use, to managed use and then to abstinence. Harm reduction strategies meet drug users "where they're at," addressing conditions of use along with the use itself.
Because harm reduction demands that interventions and policies designed to serve drug users reflect specific individual and community needs, there is no universal definition of or formula for the implementation of harm reduction. However, HRC considers the following principles central to harm reduction practice.
Accepts, for better and for worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.
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Establishes quality of individual and community life and well being - not necessarily cessation of all drug use - as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm.
Ensures that drug users and those with a history of drug use routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.
Affirms drugs users themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use, and seeks to empower users to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.
Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people's vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm.
Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with licit and illicit drug use.