North Valley Harm Reduction Coalition

We’re a group of 30 people who recognized the lack of harm reduction in Butte County and came together to do something about it in July 2018! We began by providing opioid overdose response trainings and free Naloxone (Narcan) by October 2018. We’ve provided trainings for local law enforcement, Behavioral Health, homeless service providers, friends and family of people who use drugs, and prescription and non-prescription drug users. After requests from community members, we expanded our services to include syringe disposal, community syringe litter cleanup, and street outreach. Since then, we’ve diverted over 7,000 syringes from improper disposal, connected countless participants to treatment (drug use disorder, mental health, and Hep C treatment from our rapid testing program!) and social services, trained over 800 people to respond to an opioid overdose and distributed over 2,000 free doses of Naloxone in Butte County! We’ve had 20 opioid overdose reversal reports come back to us, from people of all ages and backgrounds. As we celebrate our first birthday, we also celebrate our application to become a Certified Syringe Exchange with the California Department of Public Health being submitted! All these smart people who make up NVHRC have read the evidence and learned from their professional backgrounds that harm reduction was the evidence based and data driven solution Butte County needed to combat our local drug crisis. Through the months, we’ve worked directly with the California Department of Public Health and met with syringe access programs in Northern California to learn best practices.