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

The Harm Reduction Action Center, formerly known as the Harm Reduction Project & The Drop-In, is the new client-voted name of our agency!

The Harm Reduction Action Center is pleased to announce that we raised $6,061 to meet our Denver Foundation matching grant! In addition to many generous donations from previous donors, we also received donations from 120 new donors between June and November 2010!

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.

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:
Denver Post Article: Needles exchange program, becoming moral issue for Colo.
Westword Cover Page Article: Why doesn't Colorado get the point of needle exchange programs?

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

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with licit and illicit drug use.