EPISODE 19: Advocating as a community, with Tracie Gardner

(Episode transcribed electronically)

Matt Pearl: Hello, friends. This is episode 19 of DOT ORG, the podcast all about how nonprofits tell their stories. I'm your host, Matt Pearl. I was a broadcast journalist, a TV news reporter for 20 years. Now I run Pearl Impact Media where I craft videos for nonprofits that get used and remembered. In addition to that, I also host this podcast where we help you build your nonprofit's storytelling strategy.

The beauty of this work that we do is that we are surrounded by people who put their hearts into improving our world. I can tell you that as a video storyteller, as a speaker, as someone who gives workshops for nonprofits, I'm always meeting just truly wonderful people doing fascinating work. And every so often I meet someone where I'm just blown away. Like this person gets it, they are dedicated to it, they are just a difference maker. And my guest today is one of those people.

I was so impressed when I first connected with her and as I have followed along with all she does, I have become in awe. We're going to talk a little bit about the nonprofit that she runs, but know that she is involved with so many different organizations and does so much work. I asked her to join the podcast because she is part of an advocacy movement and she has such an exquisite grasp of everything that that requires from a storytelling standpoint. She is the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, Tracie Gardner. Welcome to DOT ORG.

Tracie Gardner: Thank you, Matt. I'm like, who is he talking about? I want to meet that person.

Matt Pearl: Oh my gosh, you are that person, Tracie. And we will start with what I always say is the toughest question. Tell us about the National Black Harm Reduction Network in 30 seconds or less.

Tracie Gardner: We call it NBHRN, National Black Harm Reduction Network is too long to say for the Gen Zs, but that it was started as a response to a void. And the void was of uplifting the systemic inequalities that contribute to health inequities uniquely in Black communities. The overdose epidemic is one of a number of health emergencies that have fallen on Black communities since the war on drugs, but even before that. And so we exist to provide technical assistance, training, and advocacy to ensure that Black communities can be healthy and well.

Matt Pearl: Now, this is typically where I would transition to the larger topic that we're going to cover today, but I mentioned at the start briefly your bio, and I want to give you a little extra bio time because you've been involved in this work, HIV/AIDS reduction, harm reduction, that entire sphere for two decades. And I don't know if it's possible to give the short version of your history in this work, but I would love for you, just for our listeners not familiar with that work, I would love for you to share what you've done over these two decades and how you got into this position with NBHRN.

Tracie Gardner: Okay. Well, actually it's 36 years this year. Yeah, it started. For me, the personal has always been political, been inextricable, whether it was reproductive health issues, but in particular, I've been drawn to issues that people don't like to talk about where there's a lot of hypocrisy. I like to ask why and push in the uncomfortable spaces. So HIV was this issue that emerged, one, because my childhood friend contracted it when I was in college and his death from it galvanized me and HIV became my social justice lens. So for 36 years, I've been involved in public policy and advocacy and organizing around addressing the harms of secrecy, the harms of stigma. And with HIV, it had to do with sex and it had to do with drug use.

And so in many ways I've been doing the same thing for 36 years, which is not taking no for an answer, honing my skills in particular around the legislative and public policy process because I didn't see a lot of people who look like me doing that work and I did not want to be an elected official and always having people most directly impacted be my teachers, my guides, and to be the authoritative voice and perspective. And that has definitely been my experience of working in HIV since the early '90s, all the way to when the antiretrovirals were discovered. Again, it's been a sexual health drug policy issue that I've worked on, the various aspects of it for the last 36 years. Started at a small community-based organization in Harlem, ended up working at a public interest legal firm. I'm not a lawyer. I play one on TV sometimes and I like to boss them around, but public interest lawyers have taught me how you not just reform what's wrong, but how you create better strategies that don't perpetuate harm.

Harm reduction is a lens that I have been aware of since my HIV days because harm reduction was a response to HIV and other bloodborne diseases developed by the people who were directly impacted, which were at the time injection drug users. And so it is an ethos, it is a mindset that people, which is person-centered, which is about respecting people's humanity and dignity and understanding that people know best what they need and it's our job to support people in their decisions for themselves.

Matt Pearl: So this is the community that you helped build really, this advocacy community, and you've been such an integral part of it. I think you touched on this, what makes the community unique is not just the advocacy work that you're doing, but also the position from which you're advocating. Harm reduction is not the cleanest subject and there is stigma and there are stereotypes that come with that. In many places, it's been a controversial subject. I can tell you one of my final assignments as a reporter was covering the Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia where harm reduction and the overdose crisis was incredibly controversial. Even though, as you've noted, there's substantial data to support harm reduction as an approach to addiction and drug abuse. But through all of that, storytelling becomes so important to how you convey all of this and how you move the needle and create the effect that you've been able to have.

So I'd love to hear from you, how do you approach storytelling and how do you do this as a community?

Tracie Gardner: Well, and that's also some of. It's the essence of the idea behind the National Black Harm Reduction Network, which is how you tell stories or how you embrace or respond to a community story in this case has everything to do with the receptivity and to the intervention. So using even Kensington as an example, understanding that if we were to magically cure everybody of addiction, would everything be okay? And that then helps us see we have a whole public policy structure in this country and in our history that addresses one aspect of a person's life.

So if I'm no longer addicted to drugs, am I okay with my housing? Am I okay with my overall health? Am I okay with my family? Are my children eating well? We want quick solutions to complex problems. And so looking at people struggling in the streets, looking at people overdosing puts the onus on the individual as the problem rather than understanding this is systemic, this is about public policy and choices that we make as a society and as a community and as jurisdictions. And again, it has never been the case where the strategy to address these acute problems when they are done in an emergency urgent way, they've always been more expensive than the ways that work and actually sustain and support people toward health every single time. I've worked on alternatives to incarceration and reentry funding and policy advocacy. Every single time we choose a acute response and then we do very little on the preventative side or on the, whether you call it reintegration or reentry or support side.

I grew up in my work in HIV understanding that housing is healthcare. You cannot navigate complex HIV medications, which they were at the time, if you don't have a home and a refrigerator to have food and to store your medications.

We've been able to reduce HIV to below epidemic levels because we have been able to address what people would call the social determinants, which are really people's lives and the fact that sometimes people are forced to make choices where health is not the priority even though we want it to be. So this is particularly true as I talk about National Black Harm Reduction Network and as I tell the story in an environment and a time where stories are being either vanished or repressed or pushed aside as inconvenient or inconsistent with the more preferred story. And it's not about blame as much as it's about understanding that as a country we're young, that slavery and its impacts are embedded in all aspects of the institutions of this country, and that to deny otherwise keeps us from really addressing needless suffering. I say if Black people are healthy in this country, everybody else will be because our lives are so inextricable with the life of America that to look at where there are systems failures, there's almost always an historical systemic inequity that has driven it.

And so the stories we have to tell are ones of demonstrating that, having our stories be infused with facts and not be afraid to flinch from those facts and then be willing from that story to want to create new stories of community strength, of resilience, of leadership, of cross-generational partnerships and network building. All of the stuff, quite frankly, that I'm hearing from the younger generation, the younger millennials, the Gen Zs, they look at the way that we've treated people with drug problems as medieval and savage.

We will look back on this time, I believe, in less than 50 years and realize how we treated people who had a health issue of the mind and how we separated that from health issues of the body have made us sicker and more prone to death and disease in ways that simply did not need to happen. They say that every overdose death is a public policy failure because they were all preventable.

Matt Pearl: So many beautiful pieces of wisdom in that, Tracie. One thing that really hit me and that I think is such an important storytelling lesson, I think it's so important for nonprofits to lean into complexity in their storytelling. We live in an era where everybody wants stories to be shorter, shorter, shorter, and micro stories are a very big thing that people want to get into. They want to be able to tell their story in 10, 20 seconds. There is a place for that, don't get me wrong. But part of what happens when you shrink stories down like that is you remove context, you remove depth, you remove nuance, and so much of the story you're telling is built around context, depth, nuance, both systemic context, which you just laid out, but also the depth and nuance of people's lives. You mentioned earlier treating the individuals whose stories we tell with humanity and dignity and empathy.

I think part of how we do that from a storytelling standpoint is we don't just flatten their stories into they had this problem or they have this problem and here's the solution. It's showing that they have complicated lives and the solutions that NBHRN might provide and the solutions that an organization might provide may only be addressing one part of that or by design, they're built to address the whole and multiple parts of that. But the only way we can really convey that is by showing that the individuals we serve are complicated people and it's not just one thing usually that they're dealing with.

Tracie Gardner: That's right. And again, to that as an illustration of that, some people think that I have nothing but bad things to say, for example, about the addiction treatment system in this country and how we think about even the term addiction is fraught, right? We talk about substance abuse, we talk about addicts, and we refuse or we're not able to then pull back a bit and see the hypocrisies that really we have grown to accept and absorb and not question, which is dangerous. So we talk about the lethality of drug use and people who use illicit drugs, but we don't talk about the lethality of alcohol and the fact that we have a protected substance that is probably one of the most poisonous substances that anybody could take over the long haul, and certainly the main driver of much of the morbidity and mortality that we see in people's lives.

Food is a substance that people use that is associated with poor health or food can be medicine, but we don't operate in that way. We want to reduce people to these behaviors. And my issue is if we're going to talk about behaviors, then let's talk about all of the behaviors that humans have and are and will continue to use to address and change how they feel. Whether you can be a workaholic, if you get a certain change in your mindset, in your mind about how you work, that work is impacting you in the same way that a substance would. And so people think I'm being cute or think that that's a cute thing to say, or even this idea that harm reduction is something you do every single day. Did you wake up and brush your teeth? Fluoride is harm reduction. Did you get in the car and put on your seat belts?

Seat belts are harm reduction. Harm reduction is the strategies we employ to be alive and to navigate our lives. The equation of harm reduction with allowing people, allowing them to be in chaotic drug use without asking why, we have an addiction treatment system that doesn't really care about why, as if anyone is born wanting to be chaotically addicted to any substance whatsoever. If we don't understand the story behind the use, then we're not actually interested in helping people be healthy and well. We want them to exhibit certain behaviors like abstinence, which I contend abstinence is the ultimate harm reduction and is not a polar opposite. But I grew up during a time when harm reduction was equated with legalization of drugs, and that was part of the war on drugs, the legacy of the war on drugs. And now here we are with legalization of cannabis and that the boogeyman of legalizing drugs no longer has any potency.

So we've adopted this idea of harm reduction as allowing people to destroy themselves or to be public nuisances instead of looking at the why and then looking at addressing in the person's totality. Again, I would argue, I would demonstrate happily that when we do that, it is not only the humane, compassionate thing that we should do as a society, it is always less expensive.

We spend a lot of money to get outcomes that we could get for far less in a far more sensible way.

Matt Pearl: So here's where I think this conversation gets really, really interesting because as I listen to you speak, I mean, I hear the weight of 36 years of doing this work and being steeped in the history and the knowledge and wanting to convey that and wanting so badly for people to understand that. I can only imagine what it's like for you then to get in front of politicians, people who are doing eight things at once and don't have the attention span to listen to everything that you're trying to say. How do you possibly then fit that into a message that not just changes hearts and minds, but compels people to action? I'm curious for you, and we can focus just on NBHRN or we can go writ large because there's so much else that you're doing in this space. How often are you in front of politicians?

How often are you in front of the general public? Who is your audience typically, and how do you communicate all of this context, all of this history and all of these implications in what is likely a far shorter amount of time that you have with them than we have on this podcast?

Tracie Gardner: Yes. And again, that's a whole other conversation about my perspectives having worked in not-for-profits for 36 years, having been on the boards of not-for-profits, on the board of two organizations now, chair of one, and both organizations are going through all of this change while I myself have just sat a brand new board and am fundraising and looking to staff up for my own organization. So not-for-profits, that's my jam, right? And yet there are elements of the not-for-profit sector that I feel need a closer examination and discussion about how we perpetuate our existence and how we do not have as a mission to put ourselves out of business. We can have lofty missions, but as long as we never forget that we exist as mission-driven organizations dependent on outside sources and always doing barely enough to address the problem, how do we eliminate the problem that we came into being to address?

So for me as NBHRN, again, it was a mandate by people who have been doing this work longer than I have, who want their own organization to point to, that's talking unflinchingly about what it is to be Black in this country and what drug policies and other policies related to them, how they've affected Black communities. And so depends on the audience, but my primary audience is Black people.

I need Black people. I want Black people. I've seen when Black people have an ability to come together and identify an issue that needs a communal response, it's been my experience that that is what works best. Now, hearts and minds, again, my motto is I'm going to get you to yes. So that means that you may say yes or no to me this year, next year, and continue. But as long as I'm working on an issue, and this has been for a number of issues that I've worked on, I am persistent. And that is both a personality and it's a skill set, and it's a skillset that I want to be able to teach and share with other folks because it's applicable to more than just this current overdose epidemic. We had a opioid epidemic, overdose epidemic in the '70s, and that was heroin. And if we had responded to that in the '70s, the way we're responding now, we wouldn't have the problems we're having now.

But we understand also that people needed to be villainized, that there has to be a bad guy, there has to be a good guy, there has to be what's illicit or illegal, there has to be what's legal. These are all arbitrary and subjective, but I like to stay in the reality when I talk about the work that NBRN is here to do, which is to support the work that enables Black communities to be healthy and well. We're not the answer, but we're part of the answer, and what we cannot do is select out people we want to embrace in our community or save. We all deserve to be integrated into community. We all deserve to be saved. The storytelling is how did this person get here and what is it that this person needs to no longer be there or to have options?

Yeah, I'm going to stop there because I can go on and on, but I do want to emphasize we're not the answer to everything. We are filling a void. And as far as I know, we're the only national Black organization specifically talking about drug policy and other systemic inequities that affect Black communities very disproportionately. So it's unique and it's disproportionate. And the only other community that has seen some of the same struggles in the midst or in the face of health emergencies are Native and Indigenous people. And we know what the story is for Black people and Indigenous people in this country. And so not even five generations ago is where the ill health, if you will, started because of the attacks and because of the attitudes about the people who are already here and the people who were brought here to this country.

Matt Pearl: It's so interesting speaking with you because as I've gotten to know you and seen your presence on LinkedIn in particular, so much of what you just said, it illuminates the approach behind your activity. And by that I mean when I see you on LinkedIn, you're not just preaching for the survival of the National Black Harm Reduction Network, you are shouting out other members of the advocacy community, of the harm reduction community. You're posting not just about yourself and your organization, but others in this space. I think that seems like an obvious thing that we all should do. If you're working in food insecurity, you should want to promote other organizations that are addressing this. You should want to be part of a wave rather than standing alone. Yet, I think it's very easy to be in the space of, especially in this current environment where a lot of funding is being cut and there's a lot of questionable funding sources have become more questionable.

Where are we going to get this money? Where are we going to get that? It's very easy to go into more of a protectionist mode or a survival mode. Listen, NBHRN is a young nonprofit. You're not bathing in money right now, but you, Tracie, take every opportunity to promote other people that are doing this work.

I have to imagine that for nonprofit leaders who are serious about this kind of change, making the kind of change, whatever it is that they want to see, that it really does start around building a movement among, as you were saying in your case, the community that is there to be served and the community that is most likely to get behind you and push that way forward. Am I right in that?

Tracie Gardner: Yes, absolutely. Because I don't accept zero sum. I don't accept scarcity mindset. I know for a fact there is enough, but there are decisions that are made. I've been, up until at least very recently, registered lobbyists, I've always lobbied and lobbying isn't some mysterious thing that only lawyers can do. It is convincing people to see your side and take action. One of the things that I've always known and have told people and saw from some of the experiences I had, including working in the governor's office in New York State, there's enough money.

I tell people, it is not our job to tell electeds and appointeds how to save money or what to choose between. We have to be unrelenting in that we want it all. We want the money that we know is there and we want you to make the right decisions about the money and where it needs to go. But there is always enough money, so I've never accepted that. And this idea that there is a shortage of money that creates tension between us and keeps us from working together when we are all connected. For example, one of the initiatives that we are waiting to get funded is this idea of black family dinners, this acknowledgement that before you can do the intervention, before you can Do the legislative change before you can do the community organizing. You have to create a space for people to understand what the impact is or what is the issue and how does it affect me?

And when you're doing it as a merchant in a community where you see homeless people defecating in front of your door, you don't really want to have a discussion, you just want it stopped and you want to use whatever resources, including law enforcement to make that happen. But what if there's an opportunity to talk more, to create a space, a container to talk about what's really going on here beyond that person in front of your store doorstep and create the space where that conversation can be had where the emotions are lower, where the conviviality creates the openness. And so I am talking, trying to get funders to understand I need to serve and create spaces where there's really good food. And I learned that through HIV. You didn't have meetings where people were living with HIV who were going to be involved as advocates, but not also attend to the fact that they probably needed food while they were taking medications or maybe we don't know the last time somebody ate.

A piece of pizza is not sufficient. And that is where I've been able to build roads with food desert advocacy around food deserts and food insecurity because you can't do any of this if you're hungry. And we know that people make decisions for their lives around what they see as the most urgent. And we also know that we've imposed our own sense of what's urgent on people and expect them to be grateful for what we give them. There is a resistance to even the smallest amount of what I call wealth transfer. You don't want to give that homeless person or that person on the street money because you don't want them to use it for drugs. Mind your business, either give the money or don't. But the issue is that people should be allowed to make decisions about what they're going to do for themselves.

And again, being able to tolerate and see that sometimes those decisions will not be the ones that we want them to make. At the same time, what are we doing to create housing opportunities, employment opportunities, to create stability for individuals while we revile them for being out in the elements and then begrudge them the fact that they want to use drugs to stay awake so they won't be assaulted while they're out in the street? Those are the stories. Sometimes people don't want to hear it because we are very much in this pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Everybody makes their own decisions. Everybody has free will. But to ignore the why and the systemic and the environment in which we are in and have been is to, as I've mentioned before we started talking, it's to surrender in advance. And a movement demands that we not only not surrender, but that we forge ahead the world we want to see.

And I believe that's possible. And I believe that NBRN is part of that movement work that's happening now, that what we used to do is not working and didn't get us safer, didn't get us healthier, it didn't get us smarter, but what's to come will.

Matt Pearl: Tracie Gardner, this has been a riveting conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm going to ask you that famous last question all reporters love to ask. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you would like to add?

Tracie Gardner: I think the power of the small donation that we as not-for-profits haven't really gotten our arms around how much people want to support the work that we're doing and how difficult we make it for them to do that. And so I'm hoping ultimately to be able to partner with you because you tell such beautiful stories and you're able to do it with an efficiency that speaks to both the attention deficit that we have in society now, but also brings home the hard hitting points very beautifully. So I look forward to being able to tell more stories. I look forward to being able to work with you on telling those stories, and I look forward to people being able to support their favorite mission-driven do-gooders in ways that we really need. And that is flexible funding. Every dollar counts.

Matt Pearl: That is Tracie Gardner, Executive Director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network. You can find them at nbhrn.org. Tracie, thank you so much for your time.

Tracie Gardner: Thank you, Matt.

Matt Pearl: And that is episode 19 of DOT ORG. If you found this helpful and want others to hear it too, a great rating or review wherever you get your podcast goes a long way. Please take the time if you can. And check out my work at Pearl Impact Media. Video storytelling can be so beneficial for organizations. I would love to work with yours. Book a free consultation at pearlimpactmedia.com. All right friends, I am Matt Pearl. Thank you for listening to DOT ORG. We'll see you next time.