Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Explore how the social construct of race and racial oppression operates at multiple levels with a rotating focus on different social systems. Connect with Austin-area justice movement organizers and everyday people with relevant lived experience to lay out historical context, current affairs, and creative possibilities for a liberated future.
SF: Hey, y 'all, this is Stacie Freasier, and you are listening to Racism on the Levels, a monthly show in the Austin KOOPperative Radio Hour Collective that explores how the human design construct of race and racism operates at so many levels, internally, interpersonally, culturally, institutionally, and systemically, with a focus on creative possibilities for a liberated future.
SF: I am a justice movement weaver, a facilitator, a guide. I'm also a Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation trainer. And I am a mother to a five-year-old Rumi, who is my soulmate. The purpose of this show is to hold space and to be a container and a facilitator, to collect stories, information, and inspiration from Austin area movement leaders. Hopefully, you'll come out on the other end of this show being more informed on the issues affecting some of our community members more than others and be motivated to join the movement, get involved, and put love into action.
SF: My guest here today is Maggie Luna. She's the Executive Director of the Texas Harm Reduction Alliance. And Maggie, I'm going to let you introduce yourself to folks. But before we move further, I must say the views expressed here are not necessarily those of the KOOP Board of Directors, staff, volunteers, or underwriters.
SF: We are broadcasting and recording this show on stolen land. Indigenous people are still here and have been faced with inconceivable losses and attempted erasure due to violent settler colonialism. This shows centers justice. We must connect with our indigenous ancestors and community members, ground ourselves in history, and be truthful and accurate about the soil we're on right now.
SF: You can find the original stewards of the land you're on if you are not here local to the Austin area by visiting native-land.ca and joining me in reclamation efforts. And a few of the many peoples that were on this land before it was stolen, the Sana, the Jumanos, the Coauiltican, the Komanche, the Lipan Apache, and many others traveled through this land and stewarded it before we got here.
Maggie, welcome to the show.
ML: Thank you, thank you so much.
SF: And y 'all, this is right off the cuff because Maggie and I have never met in person before five minutes ago. But we've been connected online for a while and we have a lot of mutual comrades who are working in the tapestry, I would call, of movement organizing, community organizing here in Austin. So Maggie, why don't you go ahead and share who you are, and what role or roles you play in the harm reduction community and other communities you wish to give voice to today?
ML: Awesome. Well, hi, thank you so much for having me. And it's so nice to meet you. Um, yeah, so my name is Maggie and I am the executive director of Texas Harm Reduction Alliance. Now, um, I spent 20 years in opioid addiction in and out of prison, um, living on the streets, um, dealing with homelessness and, um, incarceration. And so the last seven years I have been able to use all of that that I've been through to make meaningful change. And I was able to fight for policies at the state level with the Texas Center for Justice and Equity. I was a criminal justice policy analyst and I was able to use the experiences that I saw from inside of the system and bring them to light, it's so important to me now to know that there are so many people out there who are living the way that I lived and just to give them the hope that it's not in vain, you know?
The degree that I have is valuable. I spent 20 years getting my degree. And so, yeah, it's really amazing and it's a blessing to be able to be at Texas Harm Reduction Alliance now where it's kind of like a mix of all of my life, you know, the drug war, incarceration, the unhoused population, everything. It's everything that I care about all at once.
SF: Well, thank you for sharing some of that and we're going to unpack that a little more. And how long have you been in Austin and what's your Austin story?
ML: So, yeah, I got out of prison at the end of 2017 and I was in Houston. I'm from Houston and I did a lot of my using out there. So when I got out of prison, I was able to go into a treatment center and that was 14 months at the women's home. And when anybody tells you their reentry story, it is so important to have that cushion no matter what, you know, cause leaving prison, I felt like a feral animal, you know, I didn't want anybody to be seen or I didn't want to be seen around anybody. You know, the clothes I was wearing were the clothes that they gave me when they got out. I had been treated like a dog for so long that I just felt like that was the way I was supposed to be treated. And so that time gave me a cushion to become acclimated to society and to grow up in public. I spent 20 years in a world where I had to fight every single day and I did not know how to budget. I did not know how to keep a job. I did not know how to have normal conversations with normal people like this, you know, because my whole life was living, you know, surviving. And so, yeah, I was able to be surrounded by a bunch of women who cared about me and helped me to grow up and provided an opportunity for me to interact with a counselor, a trauma therapist, and start pulling that stuff up out of me and realizing, hey, I'm not a bad person. I just didn't know how to deal with those things. After spending 20 years beating myself up that I'm just a drug addict, nobody's ever going to be able to fix me. And I was just kind of okay with that at the end. I was just, I'm either going to die or end up in prison. I just can't do this. And yeah, being able to have that time and then start realizing, oh, I want to do something with my life, you know? And that's when I started getting involved in advocacy because when I got out of prison this time It was so hard because I was older.
SF: Can you ground us in age like at what age were you first incarcerated and then were you re-incarcerated?
ML: So my first incarceration was in 1996. I was 16 years old and that was just a juvenile stay. And then from there, I think the next time I got incarcerated, I was pregnant with my oldest. So, gosh, it was years later. I'd gone in and out and so I was kind of just used to it, you know, used to the, okay, I'm going to go get booked, whatever. I didn't cry. I didn't, you know, you were in the system at that point. So I would see other girls come in like, Oh my god, what am I going to do? And I'm like, you're going to sit here or get bonded out. I don't know what you're going to do, but you know, it's just, it was just normal to me. This last time I was older, I had already lost custody of all three of my children because of my addiction, because of my inability to be supportive. I was not stable. And when CPS came into my life, they wanted me to get off of opiates, to fix everything. Yeah, right. You're a single mother of three and have been using for 20 years. So we want you to just stop and if you can't do that, then we'll take care of them. And so they terminated my parental rights while I was using. And so when I went to prison this last time, I didn't care anymore. I was somebody with nothing left to lose. And that's one thing that I always want to reiterate to the system, the people who are making laws. Once you take everything from somebody, that's when the community is no longer safe. If you really care about community safety, you need to be investing in these families because not only did I not care about my community, I had three children who were angry and were all are in separate communities being affected by a system that does not care about them. But yet this system fed money to families to house my children, but never cared for them. And so, um, yeah, it's money that we're investing in a system that is breaking people. But so this last time I went to prison, I had already lost everything. I did not care anymore. And, uh, I was older. And so, when the summer came, you know, I had gone through it before and it was hot. This time I honestly thought I was gonna die. And being in a dorm with no air, no movement, suffocating with older people who were also there, and I was in state jail this time, so none of us had more than a two-year sentence. So one of our biggest fears every day was, is this sentence going to be a death sentence for me? I was in there for less than a gram. And I was terrified every day that I may not make it out because of less than a gram. And so that just kind of like fed me to come out, because I kept thinking if somebody knew what was going on in here, they would shut this place down. You know, my naive little mind thought that, you know? And so when I came out and started telling people and advocating for the women that were still in there dying, I started realizing that they do know, but none of us are coming out and telling that story. And so they need us. I went to my first legislative session in 2019. I didn't know anything about decorum or anything. You know, I just heard the director of TDCJ, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, telling all of the legislators how beautiful everything was running inside. Everything's fine. Nothing to see here…we take care of our women, we do this and we do that. I was able to go up and be like, I don't know what they're talking about. I just walked out of the gates and I didn't have toilet paper. When I asked for toilet paper, I was shamed. I was dehumanized. I don't know what he's talking about, but I'm telling you from the inside. And so that was so empowering to me to be able to speak truth to power. And then my whole mind is like, this is what they've been hearing. They've been hearing their side of the story this whole time. And so it's important for me to go back in and get those stories, get those women to come out here and speak truth to power. Tell them what's really going on. You can't continue to treat humans this way. I don't care what they did. I never met somebody in prison who deserved to be treated like an animal, never.
SF: So many questions and so many places we can go with this Maggie. I look forward to staying together as comrades forever and we can keep on peeling the onion, right, of your life and your lived experience. I’ve been hosting this show now since August 2022, and last month was Cynthia Simons. And I’ve interviewed Bill Wallace from Tomorrow’s Promise Foundation. He was talking about 85 To Stay Alive and you just mentioned the heat. It's really poetic that all of y'all are synchronous in your stories and your work in the movement. Hopefully, the long-time listening audience will be able to add another piece to the puzzle, another piece to the puzzle. And then you begin to see the enormity and the lack of humanity that is happening to our friends, our neighbors, our community members everywhere. You talked about the systemic aspect and there are so many interlocking systems. Looking back, it sounds like you've done a lot of reflection. What are some of the systems that failed you or, were intentionally designed, in my opinion, to turn you into a statistic, to incarcerate you, to become addicted to a substance and then had all of these things happen to you? What are some of the systems that could have been in place for you, Maggie Luna, in your life that weren't there?
ML: So this, you know, was all my life. And so I didn't really start making the connections until I started advocating and doing more research and oh my gosh, this is exactly what happened to me. I grew up in a predominantly white community in Conroe, Texas, north of Houston. And we were in the woods. And so whenever I started having behavioral problems, I was looked at as just disposable. The first time I went to jail, I was arrested on campus. So the education system failed you. Exactly. And due to all of these problems, I started using at this age, because that's what I was, that was the message I received. This is who you are, you know, you deserve to be with these people. And so I started using and in that time I, was sexually assaulted. I went to the police and they told me they couldn’t know I didn't consent because I was a drug addict. So the system of law enforcement showed me exactly who they were. This was a football player that they did not want to investigate. It was easier just to blame it on me. So that was another message, you’re disposable. This is just who you are, you know? And so I started getting involved in all of these systems. I was in a predominantly white neighborhood, and I got arrested with white girls. I don't know one single time that I got arrested with a white person who did the same time as me. I got arrested with several of them, but one time in particular, I remember I had less than a gram. She had 3.75 grams. She got home time – she got back from court and got time served. So I was very excited thinking I'm going home. I got sentenced to a year.
SF: Now enters the disparity within the legal system.
ML: Exactly. And the first felony I ever got was because I was pregnant, I got evicted from my house, and I needed a place to go immediately. I couldn't find a job because of my criminal background. And so I found a way to get a deposit for a new apartment through fraudulent checks with a girl that was doing it. She introduced me to this person. She had a long rap. She got her charge dropped from tampering with government documents. That's what I got arrested for. She got her charge dropped to forgery and did 90 days. I got a two-year TDC sentence. For the same exact thing, we got arrested on the same exact day. And so I started to see the inside of the system. I would also see preferential treatment.
SF: Racism. There is privilege based on race.
ML: Exactly.
SF: And we are walking through all the systems here, in your story, right? Housing insecurity, the housing system, the banking system, economic disadvantage. All clearly illustrated in your story, Maggie. What about health?l Where did health come in or not come in?
ML: Well, that was never the priority for me, because my priority was survival.
SF: What I meant was like access to mental health services or counseling or any of that. Was any of that ever present in the beginning for you?
ML: No, and whenever I started getting into the CPS system, I was afraid to tell them that I might need help because then what are they going to think about me? You don't want to lose your kids. That's just a natural, maternal, human instinct. So I'm trying to put on this brave face and be like, what do you want from me? I want to do it. And it became too much because I did not have anybody that could help guide me through this situation, you know? And so after I lost my kids, I realized I was self-medicating for 20 years. That was a mind-blowing moment for me. Like, oh my God, I've been needing some kind of assistance. And that was my coping mechanism. And so once I did start finding mental health specialists that were able to support me. Man, I'm telling you, I haven't used since. This could have happened 20 years ago when my behavioral issues started at 16 years old. You know, if somebody would have invested some time, man, I don't even know. I don't even know what would have happened, but it's the system, you know?
SF: It's the systems, the interlocking systems.
ML: Right. My life was not worth saving, but somebody else that went to school with me who was a football player, his life was worth saving. I was disposable.
SF: You're kicking up a lot for me too. I'm open about it. It's through adversity and traumatic experiences that I have my power. As I can tell, you have your power in that. I wouldn't take it back. It was painful. It was really painful, but it's also my superpower. I grew up in a South Texas football culture and I was an art kid in a family with a lot of untreated mental illness. A lot of things happened as a result of that. And I was also about 16 when I started seeking relief and comfort in the wrong places. I share all that to say thank you, because you're already reaching me, right? And I'm sure there's someone else listening that needs to hear and be empowered and find their power, because their power is still there. It's just been broken down with a bunch of untruths. And I like to say that we have lived expertise. The stuff that we've been through is a superpower. I mean, nobody would pay to go to a college like that, you know?
ML: Right, for sure. But they pay to study our lives. They pay to study why we do the things that we do.
SF: Well, and particularly you. I'm a white woman sitting behind this mic, but particularly walking through life with a body of color, a body of culture, as Resmaa Menakem says. As a body of culture, you have a layer that I will never understand. And a lot of my adversities and challenges can either be hidden or masked. I can shrink back into whiteness. I can hide, right? And I know that, and I'm really aware of that. And that's my work here in this movement is to, you know, figure out how to bring my contribution to the movement for justice in all areas of our lives as a white woman doing the work that white anti-racism calls for.
ML: I love that. I mean, I really, really love that because one thing that I did notice in this work was a lot of white women get the voice. They get the attention. And instead of lifting this, you know, perception, they continue. Oh, well, it's like oppression Olympics. Well, I went to prison too. Yeah, you did. But you also went to prison for something that my Black friend is doing 50 years for right now, you know, and you're out able to tell your story. And so it's something that is so needed, and it's work that I've had to do too, as somebody who does not know what it's like to live in a Black body. I can't say that my oppression is worse. I can't. But I can give somebody the space to speak, you know? And I can show people, hey, I'm able to speak to you about what's going on over here. You know, I have three children. Two of them were with a Black man and one was with a white man. And so, I mean, the whole story is, my oldest daughter got adopted by my mother and my two youngest were split up by the system and put in two different homes. And even that shows me the value of these children. My daughter was worth saving with a family member, but my kids, my other two were just thrown to the wolves. And so for my son, Cynthia (Simons) and I worked on a bill that got my son back. After seven years of being in the system, he moved nine times to different foster homes. And so after all of that, we got the law changed and now he's in my home. But that is a whole new can of worms, you know?
SF: Right, and at what expense?
ML: Exactly.
SF: All right, we're gonna have to take a pause for some station traffic and we will be right back.
(KOOP announcements)
SR: Welcome back y 'all. This is Stacie Freasier. You are listening to Racism on the Levels. I have the sincere pleasure of sitting with Maggie Luna, the Executive Director of Texas Harm Reduction Alliance. I don't know why that one twists on my tongue. What do you, how do you refer to the organization in like shorthand?
ML: THRA
SF: Okay. Let me burn that into memory. THRA. If you're just joining in at the half hour, we have been listening to, Maggie's very brave sharing of her harrowing lived experiences with the carceral system, substance abuse, losing her custody of her children, and how all of those experiences have forged her amazing and powerful work that she's doing today. And so if you were listening in right before the break, we were talking about how her three children’s outcomes were different. And there was a racial difference at play.
ML: Yeah. So I have two children that were with a Black man and one child with a white man. My oldest child was adopted by my mother. My youngest one was adopted by the family that fostered her and I haven't had contact with her since 2015. I was told to tell her goodbye. As a mother, you have to tell your child goodbye. I mean, that still blows my mind.
SF: That's the ultimate cruelty.
ML: A man, a white man told me to go tell your child goodbye because we've got her now. And so my son was placed in nine different homes, fostered, hospitalized twice, placed on medication, deemed unadoptable. When I got out in 2017, I started asking, can I get him back? Can I get him back? No. And they told me, Ms. Luna, have you forgotten that you have no rights? And so we got the law changed in 2021. He's home now, but it's insane because I do have my oldest daughter who's white and I have not lost contact with her. My son, I didn't know for seven years, and he is a product of the system. He has no education because he was never in one spot long enough to get the education that he deserves. And so my daughter is getting ready to go to college. My son, I'm happy if he just stays at school all day, you know?
SF: How old is he now? Is he still in school?
ML: Fourteen.
SF: That’s a hard age anyway.
ML: And he's bigger than me. When he left, he was tiny. And now he's a whole foot taller than me. And we have to learn to live with each other, you know? And it's just, it's insane to be able to see this on so many levels. The treatment that my son gets at school when he has a bad day is the possibility of going to jail. My daughter has resources because she's in a well-resourced neighborhood. My son is in a neighborhood where, you know, it's just, we'll just arrest him. It doesn't matter that he's 14 and we're going to ruin his life, you know? And so the treatment I see every single day, I will never know what it's like to wake up as a Black boy. And he's 14, he's huge, but he's not mentally 14. He's a child at times.
SF: That that came up last month in my conversation with Cynthia – the disruption of moving.
ML: Yes.
SF: Because you or your family does not have the resources it needs to stay in place.
ML: Yeah.
SF: That is insurmountable almost to overcome.
ML: Yeah, and even if you would have stayed with me in my addiction, right? I mean, I still would have provided more stability than the State of Texas did.
SF: I appreciate you giving voice to that because keeping families together, keeping children with their parents and then helping support that family unit, that system is way healthier. And it's safer for our communities.
ML: Yes, safer. You know, prison never helped me. Prison and rehab and all of that, none of that made anything safer. When my son came home, he was a danger to me and to my community. Because of such a beautiful, wonderful, tight-knit community here in Austin, he is 100 percent better than he was when he came home. Bill Wallace is a mentor to him. He's able to call him when he's having a bad day. We have people in the community who have stepped up. They don't have any reason to have to do that, except for the fact that he's part of the community. You know, and when my son is having some kind of meltdown, I have several people who will jump in and be like, hey, you know, I've been here, I can do this, I can do this. You know, prison never fixed anything like that. The State of Texas didn't offer him anything like that in the seven years that they had him. You know, they didn't offer him any kind of support.
SF: I’d like to build some breathing into this. Let's just give a second to give honor to that. To honor the grief.
ML: Yeah, and it's really a beautiful thing to see now even with Texas Harm Reduction Alliance to see people who care about people in the streets every single day. They don't have to be there, you know? But it's because it's what they want to do. And guess what? That's making our community safer. Yes. You know, we don't have guns and badges and all of that. We just have humanity and connection.
SF: Food, clothing. Roofs overhead. The basics. Or just breathing – mindfulness, meditation, bodywork.
ML: Yeah. I saw somebody the other day, he was exhausted and I could tell just he's tired of the life that he's living. And we just locked eyes and took a big deep breath together. And he's like, I'm exhausted. And I was like, yeah, I can tell, you know, and sometimes that's all somebody needs. They just want you to understand that they don't want to be where they're at. You know?
SF: Yeah. All right, I love this next part of the conversation because we're gonna be talking about the cool stuff that's happening. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, but let's also give flowers to our community members, right? We've already mentioned Bill and Tomorrow's Promise Foundation and Cynthia Simons a couple of times with the Texas Center for Justice and Equity, and you actually worked there, right?
ML: We all worked together for years. Yes, I was a Policy Analyst and I led the Statewide Leadership Council, which is advocates who've come out of prison or have experience with the system who want to learn how to advocate for policies.
SF: How how does someone get connected in to TCJE, for example?
ML: Well, I would send people to the Facebook Page for Statewide Leadership Council.
SF: And there were a lot of formerly incarcerated, right? How do they hear about it? How does it work?
ML: Well, going on the prison radio, which is a station that airs live on Friday nights inside of the prisons. I would tell people about it that way. Also, just my own connections. Like, hey, my cousin, my uncle's incarcerated. I want him to know what's going on out here. And I would start writing them or somebody else. I would connect them with somebody else who's writing them, you know? Time Done is also an organization that works with formerly incarcerated people. And so just being able to connect people with each other, because one person may not want to do advocacy. They just want to rest.
SF: Yeah, or they don't need to do. They don't owe society anything. In fact, society has taken away so much from them that I wouldn't pass judgment on anybody who went through that lived experience and just wanted to survive and rest.
ML: And also just telling people, hey, I served my time. I paid my debt to society, but I'm still bein punished every single day. I still can't get a place in my name.
SF: Debt to society. Let's just be real, like really. In most cases, no. Because it wasn't even real. There was a crime because the legal system has a lot of structural racism in it.
ML: There's still people out there that have done way worse. They will never see the inside of a jail. You know, I just got caught.
SF: Right. Exactly. So Time Done.
ML: Time Done. You can go to timedone.org or you can also see what Statewide Leadership Council is doing. There's a Facebook Page if you want to get involved in upcoming events. There's the Family Preservation Leadership Council, and tomorrow night, there's going to be a community fireside chat for families who've been affected by the system to talk about their experiences with family courts. And that's the thing, I want to stay connected with everybody because not everybody has the same needs and I can't do everything for everyone. And I don't want to, you know? We have Working Group 512 that's out there constantly helping with furniture, food.
SF: Tell me about Working Group 512, because that's a new one for me.
ML: It's somebody that I met in the community, you know, who helps with food security. They also have furniture that they collect for women who are getting into their first place. I know they've helped house people before. And we have Austin Mutual Aid. They're always out there every single day, making sure our community is fed, clothed, you know, and when the weather is hot or cold, they're out there making sure people aren't dying.
SF: We Can Now. Antony Jackson, Sr. was an early guest on the show and he's out there doing Sunday service.
ML: Pamela Bryant is out there with Walking by Faith every Sunday at three. She is at Esperanza Center.
SF: Once you start listing out and handing out flowers, you realize, wow, there are so many people that care. There are so many people here. They may not be visible to everybody, but they’re there.
ML: They're not trying to, you know? It's one thing to want to be out and show everybody, I want 50 million likes on this post. So I'm going to use what I'm doing to get that.
SF: Tell me if you've experienced this – this a racism question. I know because I was deep into the nonprofit industrial complex for 20 years. I went to grad school for nonprofit leadership management. White people, us white people are notorious for co-opting movements led by people of color. Have you experienced that? Have you seen that?
ML: 1000 percent. So one of the biggest hurdles that I've had to overcome is somebody that I trusted with everything, and they started the Statewide Leadership Council with me and throughout the years, it just became split off. And all of the work that I had been putting in for so many years, I never really took intellectual property ownership over because I trusted these people. And everything that I did was taken and used on another group that is led by white women, only white women. Now that they've been called out, they've shown a couple of Black faces, but it's primarily for white women who've been incarcerated and their sentences would never ever be sentences that we see. And so the work that I had done was taken, and then I was told that I was unapproachable.
SF: How tired is that one? Like the angry woman of color.
ML: Yes. Right. And gosh, you didn't do it all by yourself. So you failed, but they're able to help each other. I was constantly being judged. Like, well, why can't you do this? Why can't you do this? Why can't you do this? And then to look up and see everybody helping each other in this group, but I'm forced to carry everything by myself. Why? Because you want to see me fail. And so it was really eye-opening because I trusted these people with everything inside of me. I had to realize myself that I was participating in white supremacy culture because I was giving them so much value because of the following they had, because of the people that they associated with. You know, I wanted to latch to their star. But my story is so much more valuable and I see that now. But at the time, I thought they meant more. Right. So there, I mean, there's no wonder, you know, that there is mistrust, right? There's no wonder because it's justified and it happens again and again, right?
SF: Yep. The reason I brought that up is that we have a largely white audience and Austin as a city, the percentage of white to people of color is getting bigger and bigger. I work with other white people to raise consciousness and awareness of these dynamics that may be crystal clear to people of color, but white folks may not even be aware of the dynamics that they are creating and perpetuating. The biases that are unchecked and maybe unknown.
ML: Yeah, and not willing to look at it. I've been to prison too. Okay, well just accept the fact that your sentence in itself, your re-entry story doesn't look like anybody that I know. I didn't have a home when I came home that was fully paid for. I didn't have somebody constantly putting money on my books. I don't have somebody today that could co-sign for me on anything.
SF: Right, maybe, you know, there's this long, long history of intergenerational wealth being passed from white person to white person that many people of color just don't have. And, you know, one of the reflexes that comes up frequently for white-bodied people are defensiveness, embarrassment, guilt, shame. There are a lot of these emotions, right? Well, those have to be processed and worked through and then put in check. So then moving to cross-racial solidarity and action is possible. So we are running semi-low on time. We have about five more minutes. Wow. We could talk all day, right? I wish we could. What are some of the things, campaigns, policies, initiatives, or major events coming down the pike?
ML: Well, I know VOCAL Texas is working on a lot of housing and advocacy in the city. And so there's always something going on with VOCAL, and they'll probably be the ones leading the policy initiatives whenever session happens. And the Family Preservation Leadership Council tomorrow for anybody who has lived experience with the family courts. It’s at 1100 West Live Oak in Austin from 6-8 pm. What I do is just search Facebook events and show up if I can. I know there's always a meeting at City Hall that needs somebody to be there to represent, you know, there's always things going on. We also have at Texas Harm Reduction Alliance a trainer who does harm reduction training, talks about Narcan and how to use Narcan and what it's like to be working with somebody who may use drugs, somebody who was on the continuum. There's abstinence and there's chaotic use and there's a whole bunch in between. When we constantly are just thinking of people who use as trash and disposable, that's how people are dying. And so info for those trainings is at harmreductiontx.org. We can set it up for nurses, for people who work in the housing field. We have an outreach team that goes out four days a week. Our schedule changes because of the sweeps.
SF: You know, Austin is quote - unquote cleaning the streets and when Maggie's saying the sweeps, she's talking about the the unhoused encampments.
ML: Yes. And people are losing everything. I was just told yesterday that what they do is they come in,vbulldoze everything into the middle of the camp, and you're not allowed to go get your stuff. And you're told if you touch this stuff, you will go to jail. So people who already have nothing are getting what they do have taken and told you can't stay here anymore. There was a man who had gout. He needed his medication. Life-saving medications. And it doesn't matter. And these people who are in authority don't care. I don't care what you're trying to find. I will call the police on you.
SF: Because that human is in uniform and doing a job of state violence, right?
ML: Exactly. And so we have an outreach team that goes out and touches these camps. And we have snacks. We have resources. We have sterile supplies for people who are living out there. And, uh, you know, we're constantly replacing tents, we're constantly replacing blankets. So if you have donations that you would like to drop off, clothing donations, ents, blankets, any kind of weather inclement supplies, drop them off at 1803 East Caesar Chavez. Our drop-in center is open Monday through Thursday from 12:30-5 pm where we we have a shower, we have a hot meal, coffee, and community for anybody who wants to come by. And they can get clothes if we have them, they get shoes if we have them, they get whatever they need if we have it. And so whatever you can drop off, you think somebody may benefit from, we would gladly take it.
SF: Maggie, thank you for this hour. It has been joy-filled, it has been intense, it has been all the things, and I really appreciate you and how you're moving through the world.
ML: Thank you for the opportunity.
SF: I really appreciate Maggie Luna, Executive Director of Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, joining me today. I hope you are also inspired to get involved. Please reach out to me if you want to get in touch with any of the organizations Maggie mentioned – I'm happy to find those and share them. My email is stacie@koop.org. We will be archiving this eventually online and sharing the link so you can share it with others. Up next is Writing on the Air with Mindy Reed. Remember in all things and all ways, love is the highest level.
Music credit: I Let My Light Shine by Soyinka Rahim