This past holiday season, something amazing happened. HBO released a remastered version of its stellar show The Wire. IN HD. If you haven’t watched The Wire, I strongly encourage you to stop whatever it is you’re doing, set aside this blog post, and start binging posthaste. It’s been a genuine pleasure for me to revisit my favorite television show, especially partway through my year serving as a Global Health Corps fellow at HIPS, a Washington, D.C. organization that offers low barrier harm reduction health resources and wraparound case management services to sex workers and injection drug users. At the outset, I thought that my work at HIPS would somehow greatly enhance my understanding of the show and its depiction of drug use, drug dealing, and the police who attempt to curb these activities in Baltimore, but overall this has not been the case, which perhaps is a testament to series creator David Simon’s genius. That being said, one line from the first season continues to resonate with me quite deeply and I feel that it captures one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned so far at HIPS.
In an episode aptly titled “The Wire,” two police detectives sift through the evidence they’ve been gathering against a Baltimore drug kingpin to decide what is “pertinent” and “non-pertinent” to their case. Detective Freamon tells Detective Pryzbylewski, “We’re building something here, Detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.” I love this line, because it suggests how important it is to pay attention to even the smallest details when striving to grasp a bigger picture or achieve a larger goal. Very few solid, worthwhile things come together easily. At HIPS, one of the key pieces to our work is our incredible volunteer program that supports the operations and activities of the Mobile Services Department.
Unlike Detectives Freamon and Pryzbylewski who started their work from scratch, I have had the privilege to support my supervisor in further strengthening a volunteer program that HIPS Mobile Services managers have been cultivating since the organization was founded in 1993. HIPS volunteers spearhead overnight outreach with sex workers, drug users, and other community members every weekend, and they collaborate with Mobile Services staff to bring daytime outreach activities to every nook and cranny of the District. They staff the HIPS hotline outside of business hours so that our telephonic counseling services occur 24/7, 365 days a year. What does this direct service investment amount to? In 2014, volunteers donated over 11,000 hours of their time to support HIPS’ work, facilitating the delivery of a number of the organization’s core services that included distributing over 700,000 condoms and exchanging over 200,000 new needles to some of D.C.’s most vulnerable community members.
Have you participated in a volunteer program that involved such a range of direct service opportunities and responsibilities? I certainly hadn’t before starting my GHC fellowship, and I believe that that is what makes our volunteers—lovingly referred to as HIPStars— such an exceptional and crucial piece of the HIPS puzzle. Washington, D.C. is known for its transient population of students and young professionals. People come to the city for college, a post-grad fellowship, or to work on The Hill for a year or two before moving on to something new. Despite this atmosphere, the volunteers recruited and retained by HIPS make time in their schedules for two months of volunteer training, followed by monthly overnight and/or hotline shifts and a series of workshops designed to increase organization-wide harm reduction knowledge. On the HIPS van, volunteers challenge each other to interrogate their privilege as service providers and to move beyond superficial pleasantries to truly connect with the clients they meet. They are unafraid to hold each other accountable for their words and actions during their shifts and embrace uncomfortable situations as opportunities to grow and learn as a team. As a side note, they also have to put up with a strikingly high number of emails from me every day about volunteer opportunities and shift coordination, and no one complains!
I argue that this level of involvement and commitment ultimately inspires ownership over the provision of services, leading not only to positive volunteer experiences but also better outcomes for our clients and communities. HIPS volunteers are key agents of what we refer to as our warm fuzzy harm reduction philosophy; they support clients in the office, on the van, and over the phone in identifying and achieving their health and safety goals in a client-centered, holistic, non-judgemental manner that validates strengths and emphasizes individual agency. In this way, the volunteer program allows HIPS to expand the range and depth of its services beyond standard business hours to consistently meet clients where they are, at a time and place that is most convenient to them.
It might sound like HIPS demands a lot from its cadre of volunteers, but I like to think of it as a mutual investment between volunteers and the Mobile Services department. Volunteers are asked to take on a number of responsibilities, but their willingness to do so only drives the staff to create more informative training materials, provide further avenues for post-shift support and feedback, and identify new ways to increase symbiosis between staff-run and volunteer-led endeavors. On a personal level, every HIPS volunteer I’ve met has been extremely welcoming and kind to me. I’ve learned so much from their prior experience with HIPS, and am so grateful that they have been keen to get to know me and share their harm reduction insights.
Working alongside such passionate and committed individuals underscores the importance of being creative about how we go about achieving health equity; our greatest health challenges don’t operate on a 9 AM- 5 PM schedule, and if we intend to design direct service programs geared towards supporting and empowering the populations most impacted by health inequities we should strongly consider abandoning the idea that this work will be accomplished exclusively by trained “professionals.” To build something effective and innovative we must look past our typical work resources and networks and draw in new members of our communities for fresh ideas and approaches. Like Detective Freamon said, all the pieces matter.
Okay, that’s a big enough plug for volunteer programs. I’ll go back to watching The Wire now.