[IN-PERSON] Addressing Drug-Related Stigma & Bias + Supporting People Who Use Drugs: Strategies for Service Providers (CEUs)

9:30am – Check-in

10am – Workshop Begins

Addressing Drug-Related Stigma & Bias (Part 1)

Drug-related stigma presents barriers to effectively supporting clients who use drugs. Our biases are learned from a culture that stigmatizes drug use and ostracizes those with substance use disorders. This three-hour training will focus on identifying our biases and societal stigma surrounding people who use drugs and actions we can take to address them.

Participants will:

1. Unpack drug-related stigma at the community, individual, and structural level 
2. Gain a framework (ladder of inference) and tools to examine personal biases and unpack them 
3. Learn about the manifestations of drug-related stigma in media, policies, politics, etc. 
4. Develop strategies to challenge workplace/community policies and culture that perpetuate stigma 
5. Build skills to interrupt/challenge drug-related stigma at the interpersonal level 

Supporting People Who Use Drugs: Strategies for Service Providers (Part 2)

This three-hour training will offer participants an opportunity to explore reasons why people may use drugs, how we can assess risk using the “drug, set, setting” model, and how we can design our physical program spaces to support engagement among our participants and clients who use drugs.

Participants will be able to:   

1. Understand the intersection between harm reduction and recovery and name the similarities and differences between these two approaches  
2. Explore the societal context of drug use through the “drug, set, setting” model and develop an appreciation for the various reasons people use drugs  
3. Learn non-stigmatizing approaches to interacting with prospective program participants who use drugs and designing the physical program space   
4. Develop skills in the asking, listening, and informing strategy of motivational interviewing to hold conversations about drug use and harm reduction with clients/participants   

Continuing education units (CEUs) will be offered in partnership with Adept Educational Institute (see below).

For questions about this training, please contact Michael Leonard at @email.

For questions about CEUs or training logistics, please contact Jennifer Fahey at @email.