Description

An indispensable primer on the politics and practice of harm reduction, mutual aid, and building community to save lives. In this much-anticipated anthology of essays, longtime organizer Shira Hassan provides a vital account of how sex workers; Black, Indigenous, and people of color; and queer folks, trans, gender nonconforming, and two-spirit people are—and have been—building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation.

Saving Our Own Lives tells a collective movement history, reminding us of the trans women of color—sex workers and radical political organizers—who created shared housing to ensure that young people had safe places to sleep; the clean syringes “liberated” from empathetic doctors’ offices by punk women of color activists who distributed them among injection drug users in squats in the East Village, and the early AIDS activists who made sure that everyone knew how to use them; Black Panthers and Young Lords who took over Lincoln Park Hospital in the Bronx to demand—and ultimately create—community-accessible drug treatment programs; and the bad-date sheets passed between sex workers in Portland, who created a data collection tool that changed how prison abolitionists track systemic violence.

At a political moment when mutual aid and harm reduction are more important than ever, this book serves as a record, an inspiration, and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world.

A lifelong harm reductionist and prison abolitionist, and the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, SHIRA HASSAN has been working on community accountability for nearly 25 years.

978-1-64259-841-4 • 376 pages