 The key principle, the ham reduction key principle is one of the most important outcomes of the project Ham Reduction for Homelessness. And in this project, as one of the goals is actually to support improving or implementing a ham reduction services for people who are in a situation of homelessness. Ham Reduction normally is generally understood as a movement of practices, even principles dedicated to reducing the harm of substance use in individual and communities. There was like the need to articulate also a need to attend to pre-existing social inequalities as a means of mitigating the so-called vulnerability to drug-related harm. So in this way, we see that ham reduction is not only this movement of practices and principles to support the needs of people who just drugs, but also is a movement for social justice. Also to support a bit with this understanding of the key principles, people that has been taking part into the project will explain the key principles and their understandings, also to see the multiple ways of enacting them and embodying them. So as part of the Ham Reduction in Homelessness project, we looked at key principles. And one of the primary or the first key principle was human rights. And it was important for us that harm reduction establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being as the criteria for successful actions and policies. So it's not necessarily that abstinence or getting people to give up drug use is the primary driver. It's actually the quality of life they have. And Ham Reduction calls for a non-judgmental, non-coercive access to support and care. And the reason why human rights are so important in this context for me is if we look at research that's been done around homelessness, what we see is that where their right to a home is set within the context of it being an inalienable human right. It is something which people can, at some level, demand, at some level, seek out for themselves. Where it's set up, even with the best of intentions and people talk about client-centered and all this good stuff, when it's not based within a rights framework or a human rights framework, it tends to be that people set up as passive recipients who must be grateful for what they are receiving, regardless of quality, regardless of outcome for them. And what we want is people who require a service to be demanding of that service and to be demanding of themselves in their achievement and not feeling that they are passive recipients of it. And that's why the human rights aspect of it serves both a purpose as well as being a fundamental principle of recognizing the humanity of the person and that we need to work within that framework. The appropriate involvement of people with lived experience of homelessness and substance use can happen at all levels of development and evaluation of policies, services and programs. And the examples I can think of are things like feeding into strategic planning consultation processes. So, where organizations ask the people that use their services what they think the service should provide and such. You can do things like getting people to chair residence meetings. So, if you're running a residential unit, empowering people to come together and work on what's affecting them, where they're engaging and living, co-facilitating groups. Some of those people ended up co-facilitating the stabilization groups. That was very empowering for them. And then, you know, you can go as far as board membership. I know people who are members of boards of NGOs and in homeless services or addiction services and they have been the services of representatives on the board. And that's very empowering. At the end of the day, quite often we're asking people as experts to share their lived experience. And I think people need to be paid financially for that as often as possible. I'm going to talk about principle three, which is tag at risks and harms, namely, ham reduction in a homeless setting. Ham reduction is a key policy within a homeless service where you will have chronic addiction. If you don't provide somebody with a home, you cannot address the underlying issues. And it goes back to Abraham Mazda's hierarchy of needs. The basic need, the first need we need is, basic is shelter, food, water. So unless you have those addressed, you can't address anything else. So if you have somebody that's sleeping in rough, sleeping on the streets, sleeping in tents, sleeping in emergency hostels, you can't then address the addiction, the employment, the education because the basic need isn't met or it's in a very precarious situation. Ham reduction often involves providing clean needles for intravenous drug users, providing swabs and all other paraphernalia that would be secure and clean. And other than that, then we make sure that residents get their medication. Ham reduction sometimes involves allowing a resident to drink alcohol and certain premises that are designated alcohol zones. If you have a chronic drinker, it's unrealistic to ask them to, okay, to use our service, you cannot drink alcohol. Of course, the main goal we all aspire for is abstinence and long-term recovery. But for those who have been severely traumatized, sometimes this may be a long way to underage and you can still do plenty of work with the individual while they are still using. The main problem with mainstream healthcare and homeless people and drug users is that you want the immediate treatment you give people to have influence on their whole life, on their whole, on their lifestyle, rather than just having effect on what you're treating. The effect of doing something is rather high and it's very effective to actually give treatment and harm reduction to people who want it no matter how they lead their lives afterwards. It's very important to have our client in the center of the intervention. You have to ask them what are their needs, what do they need, what do they want to do. People in homeless situations are experts in their lives. So the best people to break the exclusion process are the homeless people. The core thing is for you to involve the people in homeless situation because they are the owners of their own lives, so they change what they want to change and when they are available to change. The sixth principle is evidence-based policies and practice and I think this is a really important principle because on the one hand it contributes to the quality and effectiveness of interventions and also policies. It also holds practitioners and policymakers accountable and an addition which is probably really important is that it should go hand in hand with a human rights-based approach. So there are some challenges when it comes to evidence-based policies and the first time we know that not all policies are evidence-based. We see that many of them are influenced by ideology, populism and other ideas about how things should be. There are interventions especially also in the harm reduction sector which are effective because we know that from the experience and the practice but they are probably not already tested as effective according to scientific standards. Harm reduction is not only about needles and noloxone. It is not only about reducing the risk of individual drug use but to create a safer environment for everyone. This includes reducing the negative impact of drug policies as well. Service providers should be involved in evaluating and developing policies. Service clients should be involved in designing and improving services. Those policymakers and service providers should listen to the most affected communities. As we're moving towards the end of this video I'd like to talk you through some highlights of this very exciting project which is the Harm Reduction for Homelessness project. A core part of our project was the training which we delivered online. Each of the six webinars touches upon a relevant topic around harm reduction, drug use, alcohol use and homelessness. You can learn more about harm's risk and vulnerabilities, about possible harm reduction interventions which have already proven to work very well for people in situations of homelessness such as community testing of infectious diseases, about community treatment, about alcohol managed programs, about peer work and peer involvement. You can also meet the Drug Users Academy from Denmark, a fully peer work-based service. And we also discussed the impact of intersectionality in terms of access to drug use-related and alcohol use-related services. All modules have been fully recorded and are available on the project website so please go and check them out. Furthermore, for each of the partner countries we have been drafting country reports which describe and critically analyze the current provision of harm reduction services. So these country reports exist for Hungary, for Ireland, for Portugal, for the Netherlands and for Denmark. The European report provides an overview and a comparative synthesis of the country reports. And furthermore, the European report provides you with very interesting results from a survey we have been carrying out in the framework of this project. The survey actually asked services what kind of drug use and alcohol use-related support they provide for people in situations of homelessness. Last but not least, the key principles which you have been discovering throughout this video are another core element of our project. You can access them of course on our project website and the document will link you up to further reading materials to good practices in individual countries and to other relevant tools such as tools for staff and also for service users that can be helpful to support people who just drugs and alcohol in situations of homelessness. Last but not least, I'd like to invite you to support us. We have been publishing a declaration to call upon local decision makers and policy makers to support the further establishment of harm reduction support for people in homelessness. If you know local policy and decision makers who want to sign this declaration or maybe you might be yourself a policy decision maker, so please get in touch and we would be very happy to share the declaration with you and you can also publish it at local level to assure your commitment and to improve support for people in homelessness as a very vulnerable group and a still underserved group. So that was my part and my presentation on the harm reduction project. I'm very much looking forward to hearing from you and please don't forget to check out the harm reduction for homelessness project website. You will find the link right after this video.