EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is part of an ongoing SooToday series — 'Turning the Tide' — that explores potential solutions to our city’s toxic drug crisis. You can read more about our project HERE.
A committee focused on the opioid crisis has regrouped with a renewed vision after essentially going dormant for a period of time.
The Sault Ste. Marie Drug Strategy Committee is currently led by Algoma Public Health community wellness manager Hilary Gordon and Nathan Mondor, who is the alcohol and drug prevention worker at the Indigenous Friendship Centre.
The co-chairs are working together in order to steer the committee, which has representation from local agencies like the Canadian Mental Health Association, Women In Crisis Algoma and John Howard Society sitting at the table.
“We're bringing back that purposeful action and goals and objectives,” Gordon told SooToday. “It's a group of different agencies who come together and share updates and also work on a common goal.
"We've been establishing what that is, and how we all kind of work together to create meaningful impact in our community.”
The committee organizes Rockin’ Out for Recovery, an annual community celebration that brings together individuals, families and service providers to recognize the strength and resilience of those living in recovery.
Now, it wants to branch out from a single event to staging multiple events each year.
Mondor and Gordon are starting work on a project aimed at showcasing and highlighting people in the community with lived experience who have artistic talents.
“A lot of them have amazing talent, right? We want to focus on that,” Mondor said. “We want to start breaking stigma by rehumanizing people — and that's our goal currently, is to continue to combat stigma.”
It’s a new chapter for the committee, which had been operating as the SSM & Area Drug Strategy for a number of years before seemingly disappearing from the public eye.
In earlier years, there was a dedicated coordinator at the drug strategy committee until funding for the position lapsed.
The committee eventually became a model where it was more or less operating “off of the side of people’s desks,” Gordon explained.
Prior to that, the group developed a work plan and Call To Action, a report on the opioid crisis that was publicly unveiled by the committee in 2019.
“The drug strategy itself may not have necessarily had traction, because its collective vision wasn't so much different than what the agencies were already kind of mandated to do and doing their best to do in the community,” Gordon said. “And then, COVID happened.”
Both the work plan and the report provided a lot of detailed information from the agencies who sat at the table. But the information was basically the “work of those agencies that was already underway,” Gordon said.
“It wasn't necessarily the work of the committee,” she added. “A lot of agencies would come together and report on the progress their agency was making, and that made its way into the work plan for the drug strategy committee.”
After COVID, the committee updated its terms of reference and reviewed both the work plan and its calls to action.
“Everybody on the committee agreed that there was a lot of information in the work plan. Some of it was still relevant in our community, but it was mostly the work of agencies who sat at the table,” Gordon said.
The committee co-chairs want the most recent iteration of the local drug strategy to be more of a collective effort that prioritizes its own projects going forward.
A large part of that will be launching campaigns and projects geared towards fighting the stigma locally.
The drug strategy committee co-chairs said they’re encouraging organizations and agencies to complete a structural stigma assessment — in other words, a review of systemic policies and procedures — as part of that work.
“It just kind of forces action on an agency to review all of their practices with the lens of structural stigma, and how do we be a welcoming inclusive place for everybody?” Gordon said.
But taking aim at stigma at the street level is something that remains top priority for the committee co-chairs.
“We're targeting the people who are like, yelling at these homeless people who are using drugs,” Mondor said. “That's what we're targeting, that's one of our main objectives.”
