Description:

2023 Women's History Month Symposium: Lessons from Harm Reduction keynote panel discussion featuring Shira Hassan, Cara Page, and Erica Woodland

Shira Hassan has been working in her own community and speaking nationally on the sex trade, harm reduction, self-injury, healing justice and transformative justice for nearly 30 years. Currently working as a fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, Shira runs The Help Desk, which offers supportive thought partnership to individuals and groups working to interrupt crises and violence without using the police. Along with Mariame Kaba, she is the co-author of Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators and the author of Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction.

Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist cultural memory worker & organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTQI+, Black, Indigenous & People of Color liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is founder of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). She is also co-founder of the Healing Histories Project; a network of abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the medical industrial complex and harmful systems of care. We generate change through research, action and building collaborative strategies & stories with BIPOC-led communities, institutions and movements organizing for dignified collective care.

Erica Woodland, LCSW is a Black queer, trans masculine/genderqueer facilitator, consultant, psychotherapist and healing justice practitioner who was born, raised, and is currently based in Baltimore, MD. He has worked at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans and queer justice and liberation for more than 20 years. He has extensive experience working with young people, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities across the country, from Baltimore to the San Francisco Bay Area. Erica is co-editor of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety, with Cara Page (North Atlantic Books, 2023).