#heppac harmreduction

We’re so excited to celebrate Loris Mattox joining the Harm Reduction Unit at the California Department of Public Health, Office of AIDS as a Capacity Building Specialist. She will be leading the CA Harm Reduction Initiative on the CDPH side.

For those of you who don’t know Loris she has served for over a decade as the Executive Director of The HIV Education and Prevention Project of Alameda County (HEPPAC), supporting and leading #HEPPAC through significant changes, repping Oakland and her team hard across the state and country, and has done almost all the other jobs there are to do at a syringe services program. She comes to capacity building work after spending years in drop-in centers and in the streets doing real harm reduction work. She also brings the experience of all the administrative work that it takes to actually run programs, and so when she offers capacity-building assistance, she will do so with full knowledge of how difficult it can be to do anything other than put out fires.

Harm Reduction Coalition is so excited that she is bringing her expertise to the California Department of Public Health and will be supporting the growth and sustainability of harm reduction programs statewide.