After closing Ruby House in 1998, we traded the home to Mercy Medical Center for a storefront office near the entrance of Gaddis Park and began doing business as the HIV Resource Center. The Center started developing strategies to insure that people in high risk categories knew their status, and knew how to prevent the spread of HIV.
At that time there were three staff, all either house aides or case managers. Community partners, clients, volunteers and board members all participated in this planning process. We agreed to target youth, injection drug users and their partners, homosexual men, the female partners of homosexual men, and sex workers.
The process was about as grassroots as it could get. The group would chitchat a thought for weeks. Ideas evolved into processes developed by the people on the frontline. They were presented to the board of directors and turned into a course of action.
We had recently launched our first formal outreach program, Positive Speakers in the Schools. Two very dynamic young men spoke to schools throughout Southern Oregon. One is an injection drug user from Grants Pass who was placed at Ruby House in 1993, the other contracted HIV while incarcerated in Lompoc California. Both were bright young straight men, stereotypes agreeable to most rural boards of education.
They also conducted presentations to recovery groups, self-help programs ands shelters. These presentations, labeled AIDS 101, were designed to reduce barriers to HIV counseling and testing. Testing served as an opportunity to get people, one-on-one, talking about the risks they take. Our goal was, as it is today, to help people develop a plan to reduce risky behavior.
One of those outreach workers introduced the group to the concept of Harm Reduction. He portrayed it as a public health philosophy. One intended to be a progressive alternative to the prohibition of certain lifestyle choices. A good example of Harm Reduction is the "designated driver program." No one says it's a good idea to over indulge, but if you do you must not drive. Itâs common sense!
He proposed supplying out-of-treatment injection drug users clean syringes, alcohol swabs, antibacterial ointments, literature and supplies necessary to inject drugs safely. He also wanted to recruit secondaries, people living in the drug cluture who would provide safe injection kits to other users.
Early efforts centered on the outreach worker meeting clients at all hours all over town. Armed with pager and cell phone he exchanged hundreds of syringes those first months throughout Roseburg. One Saturday he hosted a class on safe injection practices at our office in Roseburg for the secondaries. He trained them to interact with their peers and to educate drug users about the risks of injection. By the end of the year, he was exchanging a thousand syringes a month with an eighty percent exchange rate. For every 100 syringes he distributed, he collected 80 used needles.
In 2002 the Center received a two year capatity building grant from the state to target women at risk of contracting HIV in Douglas, Coos and Curry Counties. The following year a recovering addict with extensive Hepatitis C experience joined the staff, and we began integrating Hep C education into the program. This grew into the Community Outreach Program.
The HIV Resource Center in Roseburg merged with AIDS Support And Prevention in Grants Pass in 2005 and became the Harm Reduction Center of Southern Oregon (HRCSO). Operating syringe exchange sites in Roseburg and Grants Pass, and speaking at public, alternative and charter schools, treatment programs, corrections, Job Corps, women's self-help programs, homeless shelters and other alternative programs. HRCSO staff and volunteers reduce barriers to screening by offering HIV testing at most presentations and providing scheduled monthly test sites in each of the towns along the southern coast.
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