- Well, I'm a dominatrix.
So I learned a lot about wound care in Dungeons
quite honestly.
(upbeat music)
It's Sunday at the Sidewalk Project,
which is our busiest day.
We work in skid row today.
We work directly on the street
with the houseless community.
We will bring out 300 lunches.
There's gonna be hygiene kits.
There's fem care kits.
There's weed.
We do a lot of work with sex workers as well.
So we make sex worker kits, clean needles.
We do condoms.
We do safe smoking kits.
This is also really important in the time of COVID.
Having safe smoking supplies slows the spread of COVID.
(pleasant music)
I think, we're pretty much ready.
Do we have fentanyl test strips?
- Yes, we do.
- [Sona] Harm reduction is a set of policies
and procedures to reduce the harm for people who use drugs,
but it can also apply for sex workers.
We think of it as a social justice movement.
These are our syringe kits and everything's in here.
So we've got syringes.
We've got water,
we've got alcohol prep pads.
We've got cookers.
And then we've got little cottons.
And then after you're done,
you can put the used needles back in here
and give them back to us.
And then we dispose of them safely.
- [Jen] They didn't have harm reduction
when I was unhoused, there was nothing.
I would sharpen needles with two pennies,
like slide it up.
So excessively unsafe.
And that's what I think it's so ridiculous when people say,
if you give them the supplies they need to use safer,
they're gonna use more.
Let me just tell you,
if you believe that you don't understand addiction at all.
If you think that is the deciding factor of whether
someone is gonna continue using or not.
Is if they have the tools that they need to prevent HIV
and abscesses and whatever.
Then you don't understand addiction at all,
and you should take a seat.
- [Sona] We know that what we've been doing,
it's been working, right?
Like the areas that we've been consistently going back to
over and over and over again, and giving a lot of love.
People have been, you know, the overdoses have been...
They've been reversals, right?
It's not death.
But that some of the areas where we haven't been going to
as much we've been seeing deaths.
And Narcan is the lifesaving medicine
that brings people back from overdose.
(upbeat music)
- [Jen] All right, we ready?
My friend, how are you?
What do you want?
Here's needles.
You guys have Narcan?
Thank you. What do you need?
What do you want, Mazi?
Oh, dog food. Here you go.
How are you guys doing?
You need pipes today?
See you next week.
- We're a little light on weed today.
(man chatters)
We have some friends who are farmers
who donate to us weed as medicine.
- [Joe] We've had people who look forward to getting weed.
And they said it's helped their back pain.
It's helped them sleep.
There's another guy I met with pancreatic cancer.
It's helped him a lot with his pain.
So it is, people are getting some relief from it.
- [Sona] We know that it's effective.
We can see that it is medicine in the lives
of people who we're serving.
(wheelchair rumbling)
- [Jen] You know we've become so aware about
how good cannabis is for so many things.
Generations of trauma, existing in one person,
not to mention the trauma of living unhoused
and multitude of other things.
Some people are used to us having it.
And then some people are like, you're kidding me.
You know, like just floored that,
I just handed them a little bag of weed.
- [Regg] I've been out here on skid row
for the last 10 plus years passing through.
And I am determined to pass on through,
but I enjoyed the resources and the services and the love,
and the people who come out and share their time
and I'm grateful and thankful.
- [Jen] You know, they haven't been treated
like human beings by many people.
And that's what sometimes it takes
to believe in yourself
is to have someone else believe in you first.
You got hit by a car?
Tiny bit infected, not too bad though.
Did they stop after they hit you?
No, they just kept going.
(dramatic music)
- [Sona] This is my friend Cookie.
Couple months I've been coming to see you.
Right now, I'm doing his wound care
and I've been coming once a week.
I'm a dominatrix. (chuckles)
So I learned a lot about wound care in Dungeons,
quite honestly.
I'm not a nurse.
I'm a harm reductionist.
And you know, I think it's really valuable
to work from a lived experience perspective.
- And I've been homeless now here, what.
Three years.
It's absolutely essential that
she dressed my leg
for the simple fact, it is infected.
And I'm not receiving adequate care
from an entity that I was evidently assigned to.
They're not doing what they need to be doing.
And so
it was necessary to seek out Miss Sona here
who is very professional in manner,
as you can see, she's meticulous.
She probably should have been in the military, like me.
- [Man] Folks.
- What's the deal, daddy-o?
- My friend is asking us to come because someone's bleeding
from their face. So we're gonna see what's happening.
Hi there, I'm gonna help you.
I know it hurts.
(man groans)
We're gonna get through this together. Okay.
Do you have like dizziness or just like a lot of pain?
I really think it's a good idea for you to go to the
hospital or clinic. He got hit and he hit the floor.
Yeah, we did a quick little first aid on his head,
but I mean, it's sort of, it's just what you do, right?
You take care of people.
I feel like that's a natural impulse to support people in
your community.
- There you go. You guys have a good day okay.
You want pipes? Straight?
- You want some- Did we get everybody?
- Yeah.
- You want some lunch too?
- Like I'm formerly unhoused and a former person who used
drugs and I'm still a sex worker.
And you know, some of our founders had similar stories,
what we really found was that connection with other people
and art and music,
really friendship was what promoted wellness and made us
feel okay. And you know my journey
is a harm reduction journey.
So we wanted to share that with other people.
- [Jen] I mean harm reduction in general
is not just about people use drugs.
We also fight against the stigma around sex work,
mental health issues. I'm a trauma recovery coach.
I bring in the trauma informed care aspect.
I was also a sex worker for many years.
So for me, I understand what it's about
and how we face so much judgment.
And I think it's important also to make a distinction
between sex work and trafficking.
Yes, trafficking is real
but so is the empowerment that a women has
to engage in sex work and take care of herself
and to take care of her financial needs or physical
her health, all of it.
So we do bad date lists also,
which just helps inform the women of any
men that might be driving around that are assaulting,
raping, stealing money from whatever it happens to be,
to kind of empower them and keep them as safe as possible.
I'm also a childhood sexual abuse survivor myself and a rape
survivor, and I know sex is not inherently dangerous.
Sex with strangers should not be inherently dangerous.
Sex for money shouldn't be inherently dangerous.
What makes it dangerous is the way that we view sex workers.
And then it feeds and bleeds off on the people
how they view sex workers.
And then they believe that they should be violated.
- Because we stigmatize people who use drugs
and we stigmatize sex workers so much.
Programs like ours don't get funded in the same way
as other programs.
You know we need funding and we need support.
We need volunteers.
We need government organizations to take us seriously,
but we need to be able to bring people closer to us
and support people so that people aren't just
dying in the streets.
It's insane in an overdose epidemic that
we continue to just push people away and then criminalize
and put people into cages.
We've come so much further with 30 years of evidence
behind what we're doing.
So our organization hires people who are,
unhoused or who are people who use drugs.
And that's a very big part of what we do because we believe
it's very important to lift people up
from within the community.
And that's the way to empower communities is partially,
it's like give people jobs you know.
Like give people housing, give people jobs,
and give people a voice.
(somber music)