CEO Report.
Hello to all our members, allies, peers, friends and funders.
First, I hope you are all healthy, happy and able to enjoy the upcoming summer in whatever way you want to. In Victoria, especially, we have had to go multiple rounds with this pandemic and we should acknowledge the impact on our community, on our health care and community sectors, and on our organisation. The challenge for a peer organisation that is restricted from having face to face and human contact with its community is very real.
Many of our programs are based around personal, close connection and long-term trust building. The reality is this has impacted on our usual outputs.
On the other hand, the whole staff team, our more than three-hundred volunteers and peer networkers have been able to continue engaging with community and adapting to the changes as well. As an essential service our office has remained open since the start of the pandemic through to today, with a small crew to keep the NSP going.
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The Peer Networkers and the DanceWize volunteers carried on throughout the pandemic to support our community in new and adaptive ways.
Thank you all.
This year our Annual Report will be online as a website and I encourage you to have a look at some of the fantastic work we have highlighted there. Our ongoing programs include our Blood Borne Virus Health Promotion Team's work focused on peer education with people who inject drugs. We were able to expand that work to incorporate an evaluation of peer support partnerships with hepatitis nurses and community health services thanks to the Burnet Institute and Gilead Life Sciences.
The project, PATH-Ex, is designed to help us work out the long term future of hepatitis C peer navigation. We were fortunate enough to have this vision supported by the Dept of Health, who have dedicated funds to HRVic to expand this work.
Our overdose and naloxone training project, DOPE, transitioned to regular trainings delivered online and continues its proud tradition of providing naloxone directly to people who inject drugs following each training. We are very pleased to have been able to coordinate naloxone provision to people in regional Victoria via these workshops.
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PAMS – our client-focused pharmacotherapy support service – continues to support people to remain on the program despite unprecedented demand and complexity of cases combined with an ever-shrinking pool of prescribers. Again, we have been supported by the Dept of Health to undertake a project that we hope will improve client outcomes and support the sector to better understand the impact of this shrinking pool of prescribers.
DanceWize was hit profoundly by the lockdowns and cancellation of music events but quickly pivoted to online training and harm reduction promotion via videos, social media and community engagement as well as well as volunteer support and training. DanceWize also undertook outreach into social hotspots over the summer as we enjoyed the small times out of lockdown in Victoria last year.
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A new project based on an old project – the Fuse Initiative kicked off in June of this year. This program is based around support for living experience peer workers in harm reduction and has not only provided dozens of support interventions for this workforce but is developing strategic documents and training too. We are partnering with the Association of Participating Service Users (APSU) and SHARC on this program. This is an exciting and growing space.
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The team here at Harm Reduction Victoria has ebbed and flowed as well across the last year. We bid farewell to two team members whose length of service was notable. Steph Tzanetis, who was most recently our DanceWize Program Director and Leora Robertson who was PAMS Service Officer both left within a month of each other this year. Leora has deservedly gone into retirement and will have more time to spend with her family, while Steph has moved on to a leadership position at our national peak – AIVL. Each were with us for the best part of a decade, and it is right to offer our thanks to them and to honour their time with us. Thank you Leora and Sass.
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This year we also said goodbye to Jessie Murray who was with us and DanceWize from 2019 until March of 2021. We welcomed Jessie from NSW and their work was fundamental to the sustainability of the DanceWize program.
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Lily Fraser, our Office Manager for many years decided to move to the country and so the regions gain was our loss! I worked particularly closely with Lil and want to thank her for helping me land softly at Harm Reduction Victoria in 2018 and also for all her support along the way.
Within the year a number of people worked on fixed-term projects and they too have contributed to the organisation – Dellie McKenzie worked with PAMS and Sammy Bamford and Stuart Armstrong worked on PATH-Ex with the Health Promotion Team. Thank you.
In particular we would like to acknowledge and thank the following for partnering and providing significant funding:
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Victorian State Government – in particular the Department of Health: Public Health Division of the Prevention and Population Health Branch and the Mental Health and Wellbeing Division
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Burnet Institute
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Thanks again to all our members, allies, volunteers, supporters, funders, staff team and most of all our resilient and awesome community.
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Sione Crawford
CEO Harm Reduction Victoria