The University of Illinois Chicago’s free, drop-in Community Outreach Intervention Program (COIP) is using harm reduction strategies to protect the health and wellbeing of community members struggling with substance use.
Harm reduction, a holistic approach to care that has also been used to address the HIV/AIDS crisis, uses social and practical components to minimize the negative impacts of drug use. Unlike traditional abstinence approaches, harm reduction prioritizes protecting the safety of the individual over achieving an end goal of complete cessation.
“Humans should be able to make their own decisions about what they put in their body, whether those things are harmful or not. Our job is not to tell them, ‘you shouldn’t do that,’” said Maggie Kaufmann, Director of Harm Reduction Programs at COIP. “We recognize that there’s going to be substance use. There always has been substance use. This is not a new thing, and our goal is to just keep people safe.”
At COIP, individuals can access free testing, treatment and other free programs with health enhancement and harm reduction focus at five community-based Chicago locations and at a Mobile Outreach unit.
After launching in the 1980s in response to the HIV crisis, COIP has grown to offer a wide selection of harm reduction services for people at all stages of drug use or recovery. COIP uses peer based assistance and education, which means that many of the providers have first hand experiences with addiction and substance use, and many of them live in the neighborhoods where they work.
“It’s always been a model that we’ve used to make our services as accessible as possible to people through making them culturally relevant, through making them accessible in a non-traditional setting where they feel more comfortable,” Kaufmann said.
Nieves is a past drug user herself, and she said her experiences help inform the way she interacts with those who come into COIP.
“I’m trying to save lives by educating them,” she explained. “I educate the person that comes in, and don’t let them go without at least some kind of knowledge. Knowledge is power.”
In addition to all the services COIP provides, the center also works with research projects and educating the wider community about harm reduction. Julio Garcia is case manager for one of the studies at COIP centered around mentoring community members through reentry after being incarcerated. He will also be working on a project starting up now that focuses on educating support systems of those using on how harm reduction works.
“What we do is basically chip away little by little every day,” Garcia said. “A person could also choose never to want to change their life… If that’s their choice, my choice is to just try to keep them living.”
Kaufmann said COIP gets most of their funding from Illinois and Chicago Departments of Public Health, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control and opioid settlement funds. Because of recent slashes by President Donald Trump’s administration, Kaufmann said COIP is cautious of potential changes that may come in the future but full services remain available for the present.
“Our hope is that money doesn’t get routed more towards law enforcement solutions to substance use again… we hope that they continue to support things like harm reduction,” she said. “Everybody is just trying to be creative with how we continue to provide these services.”
How to access COIP services:
COIP has five facilities across the city, including COIP’s Main center on the Near West Side UIC campus, the Uptown Neighborhood Health Center, the West Side Field Station, South Side Field Station and Southeast Side Field Station. Clients can access the facilities from Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Health educators like Maria Nieves are on site to greet clients and provide information on how to navigate their services to create a personalized treatment plan. COIP’s mobile clinic can deliver medicine out in the community; location and hours can be found by calling 312-785-7195.
Anyone can access their free services, which include HIV and Hepatitis C testing; counseling and treatment; syringe exchange and services, safe snorting kits and Narcan; testing strips and on-site drug testing for dangerous additives such as fentanyl and xylazine; and substance use recovery support and treatment referrals.