We need your support

The qathet region, including the city of Powell River, continues to face the overlapping crises of a toxic drug supply, rising costs of living, homelessness, and inadequate mental health supports. Local non-profits, peer advocacy groups, and service providers have done important work to increase access to housing, healthcare, and harm reduction, contributing to fewer toxic drug fatalities. Still, services have not kept pace with need, and misunderstanding about harm reduction has led some to blame these supports for an increase of visible homelessness, substance use, and petty crime.

Recent misinformation has deepened stigma and pushed governments away from evidence-based solutions advocated by people with lived experience and health care workers. Instead, the conversation has shifted toward involuntary treatment and recriminalization. Approaches that are well documented to increase harm and fail to address the root causes of addiction.

In response to this widening gap between need and resources, we formed the qathet Harm Reduction Society: a grassroots nonprofit comprised of current and former substance users who care deeply about each other and the wider community. Our mission is to promote the health, dignity, and safety of people who use substances by ensuring that the voices of those with lived experience guide the expansion of harm reduction and recovery services in qathet.

We recognize that poverty, racism, criminalization, social isolation, homelessness, trauma, mental illness, and the toxic street supply created by prohibition all increase vulnerability to substance-related harms. These harms are not personal or moral failings; they are the result of systems and policies that too often fail the people most in need of care.

qHRS aims to create the low-barrier, community-based programming needed to empower, educate, and strengthen people who use substances while building long-term safety, healing, and stability. These initiatives will improve the safety and quality of life of everyone living in qathet by reducing survival based petty crime, open substance use, and public disorder, including unsafely discarded paraphernalia and messes from encampments.

Please donate to our Go Fund Me, if you have the means, to help qHRS start this important work. The more community support we have, the more successful we will be!