This month we welcomed guest speaker Kate LaBore from the Fireside Project, who joined us live in the middle of her volunteer shift on the support line. Fireside is a free, volunteer-run peer support service for people who are in the middle of a psychedelic experience or working to integrate one afterward. It reaches callers across all 50 states by phone, text, and app. Kate walked us through how the work happens: how volunteers are trained, what falls inside and outside their scope, when a call gets handed off to 911 or 988, and the anonymous database that is becoming one of the largest records of psychedelic use outside a clinical setting. She also shared that she's launching an online integration circle for people using psychedelics to navigate aging, with its first meeting June 1.
That conversation opened into a longer discussion about peer support as a way to reach people the medical system leaves out. Michelle described her peer-to-peer counseling at LEAF, the Ypsilanti harm reduction nonprofit, where she works with people in addiction, many of them unhoused, and leans on lived experience rather than a clinical role to build trust. Elaina, who holds a degree in social work, spoke to the limits of formal care and the case for training more people to do this work in their own communities.
We also got our first look at a harm reduction comic book DPMI is helping bring to life. It's being printed in Michigan and will be free to hand out at events. We closed with task force and outreach updates, the now-finished political outreach survey available on our website, and two upcoming community events: the Great Lakes Foragers Gathering on June 18 to 21, and Myc Fest in Pennsylvania on July 31 to August 2.