Neighbours podcast: How Peterborough Drug Strategy brings together a dozen organizations in a coordinated response

The Peterborough Drug Strategy was started in 2009 as a way to bring different organizations together to coordinate a joint response to the drug crisis. Today, they’re the name behind the projects making headlines responding to the overdose crisis: from the Consumption and Treatment Services site to the Mobile Supportive Overdose Resource Team and many more.

It is an unincorporated collective with four core member organizations that each represent one of the four principles that underlies the group’s approach to drug use: Peterborough Public Health represents prevention; the Peterborough AIDS Resource Network (PARN) represents harm reduction; Fourcast represents treatment; and the Peterborough Police represents enforcement.

There are also 13 partner organizations that are a range of not-for-profit organizations, government agencies, and other bodies that work with or provide services to people who use drugs.

The drug strategy coordinator Jessica Penner says that having all of these voices at the table helps to identify the biggest needs in the community and come up with projects to address the gaps between mandates, oftentimes leveraging limited resources in the community to reach ambitious goals.

Listen to this edited interview with Penner on what the drug strategy is and how it works.

Episode transcript coming soon.