Conversation with Ann Livingston

Download or listen to John and Peter’s March 27, 2018 conversation with Ann Livingston. Ann invented the movement to eliminate harms associated with drug use. In 1998, she co-founded the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), a group of users and former users who work to improve the lives of people who use drugs. Through user-based peer support and education, VANDU helps people who use drugs to live healthy, productive lives and ensures they have a real voice in their community and in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.

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For ten years following the 2010 publication of their book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John and Peter hosted conversations with neighborhood activists on their community-building work.  All their ideas are still at work and continue to be influential for anyone engaged in creating the future in the present. The transcript here has been edited for length and clarity.

Organizing the Unorganizables:

Conversation with Ann Livingston

March 27, 2018

 

Maggie Rogers: We are pleased to be joined by Ann Livingston, who is a long-time community organizer and invented the movement to eliminate harms associated with drug use. In 1998, she co-founded the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), which helps people who use drugs to live healthy, productive lives and ensures that they have a real voice in their community.

John McKnight: Welcome, everybody, and welcome, Ann. Ann Livingston is an old friend, and I think she brings to us some great insights into the world of organizing,“” with people that are thought to be unorganizable. Ann has been a principal in the development of an organization of drug users in Vancouver. It’s a particular neighborhood in terms of its focus, it isn’t city-wide.

Ann, I wonder if we could begin by your telling us how you first got involved in the neighborhood and with the concerns of the people there?

Ann Livingston: Yes, I moved to this neighborhood in 1993. It’s a very old part of Vancouver, and it’s full of single-room occupancy hotels. But there was a family-centered housing co-op two blocks from what they called “ground zero” at Main and Hastings. I knew you from having a child who –– I think he was 10 or 11 at the time –– has cerebral palsy and autism. John, you certainly rocked my world in terms of understanding what was the best parent I could be for a child like that, and what services and those kind of things were about. It was very noticeable that we had a very high rate of drug overdose and there were lot of people dying in the neighborhood. I

People were outside and they had nowhere to go, and I thought that the smartest thing we could do was to have them come together and form an association. ’I thought that if we could just approach the politicians, and tell them about it, they could fix this problem. Which is humorous now, but that’s how I got involved. As a busy mom.

John: How did you think the politicians could fix the problem?

Ann: Well, it was so obvious, and it still is obvious to me, but ’they’re a very stubborn lot, politicians. Social services  gives out a monthly check for people who are destitute, and then the health department, I is working at cross-purposes. Then the police are really working at cross-purposes with those two ministries. Then the courts, they are not understanding who they’re sentencing, and the jails are holding people in such a way that they’re damaging their health.

For some reason, I could see how it could not be so ’terrible. That’s the kind of thing I thought we would be able to have a discussion about: policy, and basic principles of good planning. What should we do when someone is destitute and on the street, has reached their low ebb? What would we do with them? What they’ve done in my neighborhood, and I think many neighborhoods, is add more and more police.

John: So, you thought if people got together, they might begin to come up with a way of making their lives better. Tell us, I know you have some thoughts on how to organize’ people. If I’m going to be an organizer, what are the principles you followed as you engaged folks in that neighborhood to begin to try to change their lives by defining it themselves?

Ann: When we first started, we had no money, and I had quite a big apartment, with three bedrooms. Also, the living room and dining room were quite large. I knew that there were a number of meetings that were already being held. I was actually approached by people who were in the rave scene, and raves at that time were illegal. So, they were a sort of edgy, but when the raves became legal, they sort of dropped away. They envisioned a number of drug user groups, people fighting for the rights for people to smoke marijuana, and people who were working to stop overdose deaths. That’s a very different group from the people who do ecstasy at raves. There is some unity, but I got to work, and the other groups didn’t get to work the way I did.

We didn’t have any money before we started VANDU. I invited people to my house for a type of board meeting, and then –– I’d always been around this; my mother is a community organizer ––  but it was very surprising to some people that I invited them to my home. They had never been invited to someone’s home, someone like me.

We were poor as dirt, but we weren’t as poor as them. People were encouraged very much that it was going to be a very personal thing, that I knew them and they were my friends, and they had my home phone number, that kind of thing. That was a very good principle to begin with.

John: Then, what then? You began to get active in public life, and what kinds of principles guided you there?

Ann: In the earliest days of this terrible trouble, when so many people were dying, I thought we make every effort all the time. That kind of thing: try every door, lift up every rock and look under it. Look for allies in the places you’d expect them, and look for allies in the places you wouldn’t expect them. That constant hunt. I ran for city council at one point, just so I could say I did it –– three times altogether. At first, I really focused on this: hey give you three minutes, and then the microphone goes dead, and there’s 20 other people lined up. So, I’d say, “There’s 19 murders and there’s 22 pedestrian deaths, and there’s 250 people who died from drug overdoses in our city last year.” Then I would link it to their houses being broken into.

People really were startled, as I was, too, when I found these things out. I never won an election, but other people who did win ’ would say, “What about what she said?” I was revealing something that was concealed. I’ve made a list of principles of organizing, because I think things are different once you get funded, which we were after a few years. From ‘93 to ’98, we had no real funding, really just scroungy little bits of funding. We were very bold. It was the people I worked with who were more bold than me, but their boldness was very surprising.

We rented a storefront and we invited drug users to come there.  We had a meeting every week to govern the storefront, and then we had a meeting every week to schedule it. We had so little funding that you got a $10 stipend for being there for 12 hours and a little packet of tobacco, so if you were a smoker, they didn’t take all of your cigarettes. Then coffee. Then it was kind of a drop-in, and it quickly became what would be called an illegal or unsanctioned injection site. We were shocked at how much the police state left us alone, for a period of time anyway.

That was surprising. I think that when we do civil disobedience, we learn to do it in a way that’s as civilized as we can, with as much information as we can. One of the great techniques was to have the drug users know everything that I could find out. Some of the other people I was working with were more academic than me. They’d say, “There’s these things called drug user unions in Europe. Do you know that the Swiss prescribe pure heroin to people who are addicted to heroin?” These were things some of the people in the group knew, but many didn’t. These were very interesting things to them, as they were criminalized and couldn’t get the drugs they needed. It was a kind of behavior modification approach: If people punished them it’s like tough love, thinking that if people made their lives just so horrid, they might see the light and then they would stop using.

There’s a lot of that going on, which wasn’t resulting in much more than a big pile of dead bodies. We were learning these things about other places, what they did, and talking about them., You’d see people that didn’t belong anywhere. They were not welcome anywhere. Then they could join a group here, where the very thing that had them kicked out of everywhere else was the criteria for belonging. It would take people a little while to let that settle inside themselves, to say, “I belong here. I’m a member.” That’s a tremendously powerful motivator for people who have had nothing. They get a fierce kind of ownership of the group, which is good, I think.

John: I know you have a meeting process that’s emerged. Could you describe that?

Ann: The meeting process is, what issues do we have? It’s kind of a bitch session or moaning session, as people call them. The beauty of it is, you say you’re doing research, and you actually are. You want to hear this. I could never know in my three-bedroom apartment what was going on in their lives. I could hear the sirens, I knew there was trouble; it’s a complex and difficult situation that they’re in. People would say they were picked up and released on their own recognizance, or they were put in remand. I didn’t know what any of these phrases meant. It took a lot of work to get people to slow down enough that we really started to understand how the criminal justice system worked, what their interactions with the police were, what their interactions were with the hospital emergency room, what their interactions were with each other. The health care they were able or not able to receive, and the housing conditions were terrible.

My guidance was, what would a middle-class person do about this problem? First, you get the issues, and best as you can, understand them and lay them out. The second part of the processwas to then do that research. Who would know about tenancy, tenants’ rights in these single-room occupancy hotels? Then we would take action; The action could sometimes be as humble as we would have a tenant advocate come. Of course, at the beginning of this project, they were a bit horrified. They said, “But there’s crime taking place in those hotels.” I said, “Yes, the landlord is doing illegal things to these people.” It took a while to really have what you think of as advocates.

Anyway, the question would come up, “The police came into my building and they kicked in every door with one warrant. Is that legal?” Well, of course, the landlord eventually doesn’t want to repair every single door in the building, so they come and open the doors. This would create an interesting question for the tenants’ advocates, who would be quite puzzled. We would often not get the reply for quite a while. If that was happening to us, we would say, “You can’t kick in my door!” This sense of what’s fair and what’s just and how our system works was revealed to the people.

We would have guest speakers come, often in response to questions like what are the symptoms of endocarditis? Or what are your rights at a hospital? Do you have patient’s rights, and is the patient advocate there? How could you file a complaint? That kind of thing. The guest speakers would come, and there would 100 drug users sitting on the floor in the room. There was no furniture, but someone was doing a blanket drive, so everybody had blankets. They were piled up to the ceiling. It was a very humble and disarming sort of group. They’d give their speech and people would ask their questions, and the speakers would always say to me, “Boy, these people are so smart.” I’d say, “Yes, they are.”

I wanted people to come and speak to the group because I wanted them to see who these people were, and have an experience of those people. I think they initially thought I was having them come because they were so smart and we were so stupid –– “We need your information,” that kind of thing. This is the thing about it: We had Saturday meetings at two o’clock. Nothing else is on on Saturday at two, not a doctor’s appointment, you know what I mean? It was a very engaging, and it took a long time within a culture that had been underground and criminalized for a very, very long time. It took a long time, I think, for what you call the opinion leaders to say, “Yep, they’re not cops, they’re not Christians, and they’re not crazy, miraculously enough.” Because they get approached a lot, too, by Christians and cops, and I don’t know about people that are crazy, but I think we fell into the crazy category.

Then they realized that we weren’t going to go away, and we weren’t going to create a career for ourselves with high pay, so we could have them as our sort of cohort or something. It was a lot of work. Our group is very old now. It’s 21 or 20 years old now [as of 2018].

The real principles of organizing that I have to share were the structuring of a group so that it doesn’t wrench itself apart, either by having too much conflict or no conflict. Both of those are a problem. Then also the temptation of imitating their oppressor, which is to become a service provider and have the other drug users be their clients. These bubble up from time to time. It’s the strength of your wording of your mission statement, and calling people constantly back to the question, why are we meeting here?

There were two more things on my list: Open every meeting with a reminder of why we’re here and read the mission or the purpose, and end the meeting with reverence. They did a moment of silence. I never put this in. The organizing that I learned was from Nicaraguans, who said that every group of people has their own kind of spirituality, and you have to really listen for it. You don’t want to bring yours. I mean, you could try that. You listen for their language, and you listen for their contradictions. Being a drug user didn’t mean you weren’t racist or you weren’t sexist. I don’t know if you have more of those problems, but I would always try not to panic and just keep thinking about questions like, I wonder how we can bring that to the group and have the group be thoughtful about why 100% of our board is men, and there are no women here? At one point, if you look at the nonprofit volunteer sector, it’s almost all women. So, I’m not apologizing for getting these men all excited about doing work for free in the community.

I didn’t put on the list of organizing principles that we created a system where our budget was revealed for what it was: “This is how much money we have.” I had a temptation to keep them in charge of things as much as possible, so I wasn’t constantly fighting with people. Turning things back to a group process of fairness was actually a survival technique forme, but it’s also a very good way to have a group not fall apart.

Peter Block: Ann, you made a very powerful statement: You didn’t want them to imitate the oppressor by helping each other. Could you say more about that? That just kind of jumped out at me.

Ann:  I think that many of the people that I meet have been clients of a system since they were in their mother’s uterus. They are the underclass. It’s often very foreign then that citizenship exists for them and this membership in a group and this caring can occur and can actually be powerful. Of course, caring can sometimes look quite pathetic, and sometimes I think the more pathetic it looks, the more subversive you can be, because no one will want to turn that into a service.

Peter: You really kept them from servicing each other, which is an instinct, like you say, that’s all around us.

Ann: The service provision is tough, because –– and I did have to say this –– it’s what I’m grappling with on a daily basis. It is the work that we do in alleys for free, to do this caring, and many neighborhoods are facing this now, because overdose deaths are so huge, and all through the States too. Having taken this on, there’s not a lot of leeway. We can be quite serious-minded while we’re doing our caring. You need to know CPR, and you need to care. It can get quite fraught.

Peter: Lives are at stake.

Ann: Yes. ’So, we’ve worked and worked and worked, and then money rains down from heaven, the government. They’ve now given it to the very agencies that turned their backs while you were pleading for help in that alley. They say things like, “We can’t be seen having anything to do with your project, because it’s illegal or it’s unsanctioned.”

John: Not legitimized.

Ann: Now it’s legitimized, and they are right in there, no apologies, or winks, or nudges. I have to think to myself sometimes, How would this not feel so terrible? Because you might as well instruct them how to do it. It’s sort of embittering and they can lose the plot, and that’s why your work in The Abundant Community and ABCD is so important. It’s exactly what goes wrong with services if they can’t remember what they’re doing. It’s so important to know that you’re saving lives, not building an empire; that you’re saving lives, not making a living; that you’re saving lives.

You can build an empire and make a living and do all those things, but you need to lead with this other part, or we create an industry. The place I spent a tremendous amount of work on is now operating with no transparency and is not being guided by a principle of caring, like, “Come in here, do your drugs, overdose, I stab you with some Naloxone, your life is saved, I call 911, the ambulance comes.” You know, the great heroism of the emergency. Then basically, you go back to the alley. You have no welfare, no housing, no belonging. I view my work always to build onto the next thing, because surely we’re not there just to save their lives over and over again while they live in an alley, and then, surely we’re not there to lobby for higher wages for ourselves and better working conditions and counseling so we don’t get trauma.

These things are now the great diversions away from what I thought, and I just have to say, I think what I have is a gift, and I think so do you guys. There’s a gap, and it’s a very difficult and awkward one to try get through: Those are important human things, making a living and being a hero.

John: Have you seen systems or care organizations that you feel do lead with genuine care and are committed to creating a community around the people they’re there to serve?

Ann: In our neighborhood, what’s occurred is a historical thing in our province, and it may have occurred across Canada, it may have occurred across the US. When I was a smaller child, I remember that we had a government, and they had social workers, and there were places you went to for help, and then there were counselors. They were all employees of the government, and if you had trouble with any of them, you certainly knew where to go, because you always know who their boss is. It’s a hierarchy. At some point, someone thought it was a great idea to have what they called community groups do these things on contracts from the government. What’s happened is that if you look, these community services now are $30 million a year, $60 million a year, businesses.

The executive directors are into $200,000 pay grades and have six, ten weeks holiday time off. Their board of directors is never voted for by a group of members. It’s appointed by the executive director who has social contacts. “We need an accountant.” This is how you make a board.

I think the most uncomfortable work is constantly feeling like you’re criticizing a not-for-profit, who fancy themselves to be asset-based community developers. They really do; they really think that, and ’there’s not much I can do about it, other than to just keep plodding forward and try not to lose the plot of our own group, but also to keep thinking, how can we build these groups so right in the constitution and by-laws, you create an ability for any member –– or any 10 members or any faction –– who’s starting to feel like the group has gone off the rail, and is not keeping the mission in mind, they can upset the cart and demand a general meeting and challenge the board.

VANDU eventually became five other groups, where each group has its own very specific concerns. They had to basically break off, because you couldn’t have meetings that long. So, the people on methadone have their own group, as do the people who drink non-potable alcohol. Those groups all form to keep being advocates for that group, and they meet twice a week every week. . They’ll often have a general membership meeting and a board meeting, and so they’re very much immediate, very in touch with their members’ issues.

Peter: Now some of them are giving back to the community, aren’t they? Could you say a little bit about that?

Ann: A person who uses drugs is often a very demonized person and criminalized. I don’t know if I need to go into any details. What our group allowed people to do –– and I didn’t notice it at first ––is keep a really tight structure at one end and just allow chaos to take place elsewhere, because you’ve got such a tight structure at one end.

What I realized was happening was that in terms of social status people would go from being someone who had no social status at all to being a volunteer who was making the community a better place, and that is a very well-respected person, certainly in Canada and in Vancouver.

Peter: What did they do to make the community a better place, the neighborhood a better place?

Ann: The first things to consider are how are you going to structure them? First it was simple things, like picking up needles in alleys, or going down alleys and looking for people in trouble and helping them. The advocacy stuff comes later. There’s always a danger that a drug user group becomes a project that does nothing but pick up garbage in alleys that are too dangerous for regular workers to walk down. You’re always on the cusp of asking, Are we being exploited or not? The other things that the users did was attend endless meetings about Hepatitis C and HIV and needle exchange, and then community meetings about litter and lack of toilets. You just become a citizen who’s engaged in whether your neighborhood is a better place.

Then there’s national work, there’s provincial work,  and international stuff going on when they talk about drug policy. There’s certainly a tremendous amount to do. They’re in VANDU 40 hours a week, and they came because they found out they could get $3 (I didn’t put that in the principles for organizing). We have an ongoing, raging debate about the money ––it was $3 at first because it was $1.50 to take the bus in Vancouver. I convinced the funders that we had to have this money allocated as bus fare, and then we called it  an honorarium. We’ll call it whatever the government tells us to call it.

It’s $5 now, and then if someone goes to a City Hall meeting it’s more. City Hall is always doing a lot because the drug user groups made the whole topic palatable to people, and everyone wants to be seen to be reducing harm, so the city has different committees, and we show up for the discussions. So, it’s just a whole little schedule of pay, because they have nothing. Poverty is a very time-consuming activity, people stand in line …

Peter: It’s a full-time job. Did it have an impact on their use, their usage, their addiction at all, in addition to harm reduction and giving them a sense of community?

Ann: We couldn’t ever really get anyone to study this. I used to think to myself, How could this be? But it reminds me of a study where they look at unhealthy people who smoke and drink and eat too much, in two communities. One has a high amount of community associations and activities, and the other one doesn’t. Well, everyone in the first one lives longer, but it isn’t because they improved their health habits. I started to realize that might be what we were observing –– because just so you know, I ’didn’t end up knowing very much about drugs, other than by accident ––one of the things that drug users do all day long, every day, is talk about drugs. In VANDU, they don’t talk about that. They talk about the next meeting. How’s our funding? What’s going to be the topic, and who’s going to be the guest speaker? Who’s taking the trip to Ottawa? Who’s coming here? What’s the latest overdose? We’ve got line-ups of research. Their heads are full of all this other stuff. In terms of asking whether they’re consuming less drugs, I would say, if they’re consuming the same number of drugs, they’re doing it in a much more efficient way, because they have so much other stuff they have to do.

Peter: That’s a great point, because it’s a great distraction from talking all the time about drugs, to talking about what are we doing, where are we going to meet, what are we going to do.

Ann: Yeah, we’re citizens, doing what citizens do.

Peter: It’s not a community talking about drugs, it’s a community talking about action.

John: What you’re really doing is talking about moving away from a focus on self to a focus on the civic, on the collective, on “us,” rather than just me, right?

Ann: Yeah, it’s a wider perspective. You see someone hanging around a street corner, and the weight of the world is on their shoulders. When they start to see themselves situated in a broader picture of society and who’s who, people can stand back from their lives. Just saying, some of this work is tough, and I’ve been discouraged by the lack of training for people who are organizing the unorganizables, and also the lack of emotional maturity people can end up with in these positions. I had to train myself so that when I’ve got someone who’s angry and just letting it rip and they’re saying, “You wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for us” what I have to in that moment is not to think, “You asshole.”

John: Have to defend yourself.

Ann: Or to think, “I’m out of here, I quit. This is abuse.” There are a thousand things you’re going to think, but what I trained myself to think was, “I am doing a great job. That guy is not afraid to tell me that.”

I say, “Maybe we should broaden this discussion, and we can talk about how many other people besides me have jobs because of your misery.” You know what I mean?  It takes a kind of a –– I don’t know what you call it.

Peter: It’s almost a distance.

Ann: But it’s training.

Peter: It’s like a clinical distance so you don’t take it personally and you realize that …

Ann: Well, having an autistic child helps, I can tell you.

Peter: Let me ask one question, and then let’s open it up. The opioid addiction is widespread now, at least in the States. How do you think about that? Do you have any way of thinking about what’s going on, this so-called epidemic in the southern territories? I don’t know if it’s true in Canada also.

Ann: Oh, yes, yes. It’s a coping strategy. Very early on, I think there was less addiction generally. I read stats that say one in four women in North America is on antidepressants or something. That’s a very large number of people who are medicated by drugs that are legal. I just have to say that as background. But I think it was Bud [Osborn] who kept saying that, at the beginning, people are admired for their coping strategies, except drug users: “People use drugs because they might kill themselves if they don’t. It’s their way of getting through and getting by, day after day after day.” Once I could see that, it helped me a lot, because they cost a lot of money, they’re so hard to buy, and you’re going to get arrested. It’s a huge headache.

A lot of sacrifices are made to make drugs the main priority of your life. Very, very puzzling to someone who doesn’t put oblivion-seeking above all else. I came to just respect that I don’t put oblivion-seeking above all else, and they do. But what I started to say was, people use drugs or they don’t. When you can come to that place, then it allows you to work with people who use drugs and people who don’t. You start to be more comfortable. It’s like a foreign culture or something.

Because this is also true: People use drugs, and then they stop using drugs, and then they start again. This is very common. There’s a sort of abstinence-based cycle. Some people are lucky enough that they just say that one thing: they quit once, and they’re done. If you look at data and research, and finally we’re starting to get science on this, most people who have two years without using drugs have made 11 attempts before they got to that two years. Of course, they don’t design services around this. I would, if I was going to design a service for something someone was going to have a go at 11 times. I would make it accessible, easy to get in, very encouraging, saying something like, “Oh, it didn’t work out for you this time.”

Peter: Get your 11 times over with, right?

Ann: Yeah, to some extent. But also, for many of our deaths, and I think in the United States also, it’s true. Because we’ve got this prevalence of addiction, we’ve also got a model that isn’t working well, and the message is, “Work these 12 steps,” or “Take Jesus into your heart, and you’re done, you’re good.” What is now being said all the time, it’s a chronic, relapsing condition. For anyone who’s ever stopped smoking cigarettes, it’s like when you are at a party and you have a drink and then you decide to bum a smoke off someone and smoke again; you don’t announce to all your friends that you’re now back to smoking. You just sneak that cigarette and you get right back to that nonsmoking business. I think that goes on with everyone who deals with addictions. It shouldn’t cause shame. The problem we’re having now with fentanyl  is that they have that one little sneak and now they’re dead. They’re found dead. We’re in a very difficult situation, and it seems irreversible

John: Ann, let me ask another thing that I wondered about way back. It seems to me that a lot of the things that as an organizer came about are because you approached people as though your concern was not that they be cured, or fixed. Almost everybody that I run into, when they think about addiction, the issue is, how can we fix them, get them cured? It seems to me that’s a huge barrier to get over for most people, and you came into this world with a different way of thinking about it. Can you say something about that?

Ann: Dealing with my son’s autism, he repeats himself and he has behaviors. I remember everyone thinking that, my family especially, I’ve made up that he has a disability, but he doesn’t really have one. It’s just that I’m such a terrible mother, that’s why he behaves that way. It’s humbling, and I think the simplest way to put it was that what we value about people isn’t necessarily that they’re using or not using drugs. There are arguments about this in drug user groups. Some drug user groups say, “We won’t let anyone in here unless they’re an active user.” They would never have had a non-user like myself as an employee. My joke about that is, we’re not going to test their pee on the way in here.

That’s another point I make: If the only way you can tell that someone has taken a drug is by testing their pee, then why is it any of your business what drug they’re on? I mean, most people are on something, unless they’re Seventh Day Adventists or something. They’re drinking coffee; there’s all kinds of things floating around in our bloodstreams, and we get terribly puritanical when it comes to certain drugs. It’s very upsetting, I think, for people who’ve never been around people who, like I said, make seeking oblivion or being high one of the priorities of their life every day. I don’t know if VANDU changes that. I don’t know how many people reduce their drug use. I don’t think they do, necessarily. I just think that they have a whole bunch of other stuff that’s their priority, and they perform awfully well given the circumstances.

If you look at what happens to drug users, usually the thing that’s frustrating you is that it’s something that’s happened because the drugs are illegal. Like that they keep stealing your stuff, and that they’re not telling you the truth, or they’re … You know what I mean? These things happen, and these are artifacts, these aren’t how the person is, this is what happens to them.

Maggie:  We have someone calling in from Illinois.

Elizabeth McGrath (caller): I was an economics major in college, and so my first thought it, how do you make money? How do you sustain your family? How do you make sure that your family is taken care of, when you’re dealing with people that ’don’t have a lot of money around?

Ann: Oh, my goodness, you struck at the heart. Right now, I’m living on welfare in Vancouver, and it’s very humbling, or humiliating. I haven’t always had that. I’ve sometimes been employed. If a drug user group gets funded, then there’s enough funding for someone to be the organizer. Not everyone is willing to do what I’m doing.

Yeah, it’s tough. I guess it’s like missionary work or something, as I like to say, we’re setting aside all material possessions in order to do this work.

Elizabeth: Right. In some missionary organizations, they make sure that you have your black slacks and your white shirts, and that you’re provided food, so you might be making lots of sacrifices, but you’re, in some degree, supported by something larger, and it sounds to me like you’re not supported by something larger. And yet you do it.

Ann: Like right now, on my personal level, what I do to make money is, I’m on welfare, but there’s now a number of these initiatives that are going on. The problem is to have someone who does the job of an organizer and then doesn’t turn it into service provision. That’s what I feel is difficult.

Peter: Thank you, Elizabeth. We keep getting more calls.

Caller: Yes, thank you. In Ohio, statewide, we have a recovery ballot initiative being organized, for the fall election, to decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs and to get people into trauma care and drug treatment, for example. I’m wondering if you have contact with people working on reform that might be parallel to that?

Ann: The Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Project in Seattle: I’m trying to get them to come to Vancouver, because despite Vancouver having a reputation for having lenient police, we do not, actually. We have a very high arrest rate. When someone is being arrested and rearrested and rearrested because they might for the first time have a drug charge and then they miss court and then they’re released on their own recognizance, or they’re released on bail, they violate their bail conditions, we end up with people with hundreds and hundreds of charges. They spend time in remand prison, which means they’re waiting to see the judge. I assume that’s why the project you’re talking about it is to disentangle people with addiction, so they can get on with addiction treatment, without the interference of this constant jailing.

Peter: Thank you. Let’s go to the next caller.

Peter Koestenbaum: The guests that you have on this program need to know that they have their witnesses and their own supporters in their audience, that there’s a circle of people who are listening in, and so they are the supports of the people who are doing this magnificent work. You do the work that we who listen in should be doing ourselves, and you do it for us, so that organizers have their own helpers and their own supporters, and they are the people who are in this audience. This program has been going on for a very long time and the job  that the organizers do for clients deserve some recognition and some tender loving care from your audience as well. Thank you.

Peter: Thank you, Peter.

Maggie:  We have another caller.

Phil (caller): I had the good fortune of being with Ann and John in Vancouver. One of the things that Ann taught me, among many things, was that harm reduction is also for the community and not just for individuals. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about that, Ann.

Ann: Yes, the harm to the community is, for one thing, a pit that any of our children can walk into. The more expansive and lucrative and available illegal drugs are at a cheap price everywhere, the worse our communities are, in that they’re obviously operating under a criminal gang system with either people producing or importing illegal drugs. There’s violence for people competing for money from drugs, there are robberies between two drug dealers. Then there’s the real harm to people who get involved in this and find that they are poisoned by drugs.

Our hospitals are full of people who are ill. There are diseases being spread, there’s a tremendous amount of harm. I think it’s interesting that you point that out because I often forget that people will interpret our project as coddling these people who are just ruining our communities. I call it “floating the ships in the harbor.” It will be a far better community, for all of us, if we don’t step over people on the street, or look at another group of people as undeserving of care.

Peter: That’s amazing. You know, we’re near the end of our time. Any final thoughts, John, or Ann?

John: Ann, if people, I think you have so much experience and knowledge, in an area where everybody is concerned but very few people have moved in the effective directions you have.

There’s recently been a book about the effort there in Vancouver, and I’m having a little trouble recalling its name. Do you know the one I mean?

Ann: It’s called Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction, by Travis Lupick.

John: Would that be a pretty good way for people to learn in much more detail about what’s been happening in terms of harm reduction in Vancouver?

Ann: Yes, it’s very descriptive in terms of the long haul of what occurred. It’s the story of some of my work, which is much more than, you know, we do the illegal work.

Because that’s the other reason to not be employed. I know what people on welfare are treated like, it’s really debilitating. So, I always say, I’m mystery shopping the welfare system. But no one can fire me for doing something that’s unsanctioned or outside the law or whatever. Anyway, that does tell that tale, and it also tells the tale of one of the big NGOs here that got bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s still here, but the leadership has now moved to New York City, and they’re working at Washington Heights.

John: So, people could follow up with that book and you’re very significantly involved in it, in the story, so I can commend it to other people as well.

Ann: If there’s, if anyone out there in Internet-land who knows how to train and fund this, these social movements need people to know how to do this work, and do it and take the high road. We might as well build on what each other has, can teach each other rather than having to feel like you’re alone and you’re starting over in every community.

John: Absolutely. One other reference. There was a book some while ago that you gave me, there are three co-authors, and it’s got a lot of information about things that have happened in terms of the neighborhood harm reduction. There are poems, stuff about your co-worker Bud. What’s the title of that book?

Ann: It’s called Raise Shit! Social Action Saving Lives, by Susan Boyd, Donald MacPherson, and Bud Osborn.” It has that swear word in the title. It’s never going to make it a best-seller. That’s what one of the old organizers told Bud, he said, “Raise shit, Bud.”

Peter: Ann, I just want to thank you so much. Your spirit and your commitment is just stunning. It’s just like no other. I so appreciate what you’re doing and the way you talk about it is so compelling. I just want to sit and listen forever. Thank you so much for giving us a little bit of time. I’d like to do this again. You’re just so generous, even in this moment, Ann. Thank you so much. Final thoughts, Ann, you’d like to say?

Ann: Just that I look forward to this movement of organizing in neighborhoods because, really, no matter what we’re facing, there’s no way around it. It is the only thing we can do. We can do it free, we can do it. There’s a lot of discouraging news day after day, but I think the solutions are the asset-based community development and the neighborliness and kindness we can show one another.

John: Lot of wisdom, lot of wisdom.

Peter: You’re proof of that, Ann, thank you so much.

 

Principles for Organizing the Unorganizables

1. Don’t ask permission
2. Invite people to join with membership & belonging
3. Listen for the language & wisdom of the members. Notice what divides & unifies the members of the group
4. Record the issues the members bring forward so they can see what is recorded
5. Bring research on issues they raise so the action decided is informed by & owned by them – ISSUES, ANALYSIS OF ISSUES, ACTION
6. Prepare for the disagreements & conflicts with a practical, useful governance structure & group process – ie Societies Act
7. Be fair, transparent & vulnerable
8. Begin each gathering / meeting with the reading of the mission or purpose of the group & end each meeting with a moment of reverence.
9. Every new member is welcomed – there is always room for one more member
10. Remember that everything accomplished can be wiped out in a flash except the enduring friendships, shared hope & sorrow and the pride of resisting the unendurable-REDEMPTIVE SUFFERING
11. Develop leadership by ensuring the organizer is only the humble hardworking executive assistant of the elected leader
12. Don’t fight for services. Progress is measured with a kinder more inclusive community where social justice is achieved.
13. Scale is important – neighborliness ensures success.Form groups as they become needed