Lighthouse Learning Series: Sex Worker-Centered Harm Reduction Frameworks & Practice
Starting in February 2025 and running until May 2025, we will be covering a series of queer harm reduction topics with the goal of creating a more inclusive movement.
Priority is given to those living and working in New York due to program scope. However, the series will be held virtually and is open to all those who would like to build on their harm reduction knowledge to provide better services to LGB/TGNC+ folks!
Session description:Sex Worker-Centered Harm Reduction Frameworks & Practice builds upon previous Lighthouse Learning Collective sessions by providing easily digestible information to support harm reductionists in comprehensively serving people in the sex trade. Session participants will learn models for risk assessment with sex working clients and be given language to determine and explain the difference between sex work and sex trafficking. Session participants will also take away information about specific sex worker-centered harm reduction interventions and networking resources. The BIPOC-created anthology, Body Autonomy: Decolonizing Sex Work & Drug Use, will be used to guide this interactive two-hour webinar.
Facilitators:
Justice Rivera (she/they; ella/elle) is a queer Mixed Puerto Rican and Russian Jewish writer, social justice consultant, healing justice practitioner, and pleasure activist based in San Juan, PR. Justice has been working along the continuum between harm reduction and healing justice for thirteen years. Reframe Health and Justice (RHJ), the consulting collective that she co-founded, is recognized as a national leader in sex worker-centered harm reduction advocacy and capacity building assistance. RHJ is also known for piloting an approach called “healing-centered harm reduction” and has used it as a framework to support local and national organizations in building resilient and caring work cultures. In 2019, Justice received an Open Society Foundation Soros Justice Media Fellowship. Her published works—including Body Autonomy: Decolonizing Sex Work and Drug Use (Synergetic Press, 2024), Colonization Laid the Groundwork for the Drug War (The Fix, 2018) and Casualties of War: The Wars on Drugs and Trafficking (Tits and Sass, 2016)—are used within university Women’s Studies, Political Science, and Human Services departments to illustrate the futility of the wars on drugs and sex trafficking. They are used within social service agencies to train volunteers and inform concerned community members. When they aren’t working, Justice loves to travel, cook, volunteer, dance, and read next to their black cat. Find Justice online at www.justiceriverawrites.com and on IG @JusticeRivera_Writes. Find Reframe Health and Justice online at www.reframehealthandjustice.com and on IG @harmreductionfemmes.
