Community Led Drug Strategy final report presented to City Council

A total of 35 agencies and organizations worked together on strategies that will help the resulting community committee build terms of reference for moving forward.

The four strategies decided upon include:

– Strengthening inter-agency service collaboration and sharing agency expertise supported by enhancing evaluation and accountability
– Integrating Indigenous experience
– Developing education and prevention programs
– Improving inter-agency client support

Robin Parsons Consulting and Facilitation oversaw the workshops and presented the report to council.

Parsons says she saw how powerfully effective bringing people together to have a conversation over difficult things can be.

“I witnessed the city has come together, and they’ve said things like we need to integrate Indigenous experience into everything. You have an Indigenous community here that feels disenfranchised for the most part, in the healthcare system in particular, for people who are struggling with addiction. To make it accessible for them, and I think we don’t necessarily appreciate what that looks like if you haven’t walked that mile.”

Another lesson they took away from the consultations was the integration needed in the systems and processes in the social services realm.

“They can be quite siloed and fractured, and they’re aware of that within those places, and so the need to pull that together.”

Councillor Joe Mauro made a point during the meeting to outline that while 288 people attended the sessions in total, he wants to make sure the people that live in the community are not forgotten.

“A lot of times we say we represent the community, but do we really? That’s the point I wanted to get across. If we really want a sense of the community and how the community feels, it’s the seniors that don’t go out as often as they normally would or the moms and dads with their little kids who tell me they don’t feel safe anymore, and that kind of stuff. I’m just hoping that those types of people are part of the discussion and have a big part of our plan moving forward. I don’t believe it’s just the service providers; they’re coming in with their own agendas, so I want to make sure that the voice of the individual resident is heard loud and clear.”

Parsons says they’ve done public engagement sessions in Calgary and gotten half of 288, so she thinks that’s a pretty good representation.

“They came out, and shared freely, so we thought it was a great representation. In the public sessions, you heard from businesses, the private sector, citizens, grandparents, children, we heard from everybody in those sessions.”

They even spent an afternoon in the Supervised Consumption Site talking with people, and Parsons says a big takeaway from that experience is that we’re all just people.

“We’re all trying to deal with our day-to-day as well as we know how. To hear somebody’s perspective who’s sitting there in an addiction site was powerful, and it reminds you that essential humanity is so important.”

As far as the next step is concerned, Parsons says that the City needs to coordinate the drug strategy with the Community Social Development strategy, which is expected to come out in the next couple of weeks.

“Pulling those together and then allowing those to form the shared directions. Some of the folks who were at the action sessions will already be championing the things that they thought were important and they’ll already be making those things happening. Following up with them and finding out how they’re doing will be an essential next step.”

It’s anticipated that the agencies and the City of Lethbridge will collaborate to further develop and execute the strategies moving forward.

by Aaron Mahoney (@Mahones93 on Twitter)

Community Led Drug Strategy final report presented to City Council

What's Happening