Creative Resistance — Work with me
Community-engaged research, Harm Reduction and public health strategy, and peer-led access to care program design.
Creative Resistance offers community-engaged consulting for public health agencies, academic research teams, coalitions, and government partners working at the intersection of drug user health, public health, and the criminal legal system.
What I do
- Community-engaged and participatory research — semi-structured qualitative interviews, focus groups, thematic analysis, photovoice, and arts-based methods, co-designed with people who have lived and living expertise.
- Lived & living expertise advisory facilitation — recruiting and organizing community advisory boards, lived-experience panels, and engagement processes where impacted people are compensated, supported, and positioned as community experts with real voice and shared power.
- Harm Reduction program design & strategy — developing PWUD-led public health strategies grounded in the core principles of Harm Reduction. Areas of focus include peer-led direct street outreach, safer use supply, overdose education and naloxone distribution, FTIR point-of-care drug checking, overdose fatality review, community-engaged capacity-building models.
- Peer support workforce strategy — forensic peer support policy and training models for Colorado jails, re-entry planning and coalition-building, workforce development, and peer support organizational readiness to protect role-integrity.
- Drug policy advocacy — turning community-identified needs into policy action through lived and living expertise, evidence translation, storytelling, coalition organizing, organizing public testimony panelss, and arts-based advocacy models.
Selected past contracts
- Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment (CDPHE) — Community Advisory Board lead for the statewide fentanyl education public awareness campaign ($4M project; mandated by HB22-1326).
- Arapahoe County Public Health — Contract to elevate the voices of participants who use drugs and increase capacity for the ACPH Syringe Access Program.
- University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus — Community Engagement Consultant and Co-PI on multiple grants exploring mental health and substance use needs among people in jail and on probation in the Denver metro region.
- State of Colorado / Behavioral Health Administration — Consultant on a research study assessing the health and criminal legal impacts of increased criminal legal penalties associated with HB22-1326 and the felonization of fentanyl.
Engage Creative Resistance
If you’re part of a public health agency, research team, coalition, mutual aid group, or community-rooted organization working to elevate impacted voices and build systems rooted in care, I’d love to hear what you’re building.