Points of Distribution is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that provides HIV prevention and other services to hard-to-reach drug users and their friends and family in Oakland and San Francisco. POD is designed as a worker-coop based the principles of workplace democracy and harm reduction. POD has a limited part-time paid staff and most of the work is done by the volunteers.
Points of Distribution (POD) emerged in 2001 out of the experiences of people active in the harm reduction community who noted that certain injection drug users, most notably severely homeless ones, were not accessing syringe distribution and disposal programs (SDD), (a.k.a. syringe exchanges), as often as necessary in order to use clean equipment every time they injected.
These activists observed that fixed site syringe provision is only accessible to those people who are able to come to the syringe access site. This often means that those people whose use is too chaotic or those who may be suffering from other disabilities, such as HIV, hepatitis C, or mental illness, do not access syringe providers. In response to this need nascent POD volunteers determined that a delivery and outreach-based SDD model might be able to address the needs of this folks.
From the beginning POD worked as a collective based on the democratic principles it holds today. In 2004 POD conducted it’s first needs assessment. Data from that survey showed concretely that the services provided by POD were reaching communities that were not accessing fixed-site syringe provision and that POD’s services were not redundant. In the early days POD existed primarily through the support of the other SDDs and the larger harm reduction community. Donations from NEED, the Berkeley Free Clinic, SFNE and the particular generosity of the Chicago Recovery Alliance and UCSF’s now defunct Urban Health Study helped provide POD with it’s initial start.
In 2005 POD received it’s first formal funding and became a fiscal sponsoree of the North American Syringe Exchange Network. With the recognition that this budding organization could not be maintained by the experienced volunteers that POD was originally founded by POD decided to hold it’s first formal training for new volunteer-members in the fall of 2006. Things began moving rapidly after that when POD was honored to receive one of only ten grants ever provided by the California State Office of AIDS to syringe access providers. This funding meant a further expansion of POD’s capacity and also meant that POD was able to apply for, and receive, it’s own tax exempt status in 2009.
POD currently provides street-outreach based syringe provision primarily to homeless folks in both San Francisco and Oakland. In the last year we provided about a quarter of a million syringes and ancillary services through about 3800 unique client contacts. In addition POD is able to offer HIV testing on a weekly basis in both cities and provide overdose prevention education and materials to all participants.
Our most recent addition has been the expansion of services to include home-delivery in Oakland and the addition of safer crack supplies in both Oakland and San Francisco. In the near future POD hopes to expand home delivery services to San Francisco.
Emerging as the work of activists with years of experience working with collective and consensus-based decision making POD is proud of it’s organizational design and structure. Like other community based organizations (CBOs) most decision are made by the Board of Directors (BoD). However one key difference is that for POD the BoD is made up of the volunteer-workers who provide the services. In order to insure oversight and transparency all decisions are also overseen by a Community Advisory Board (CAB). The CAB acts more like a tradition non-profit BoD and is made up of people with technical expertise and/or long-term commitments to the larger harm reduction community.
POD has limited part-time paid staff members who perform many of the core organizational and administrative tasks necessary to keep the agency running and are overseen by the BoD.
- Catherine Swanson, MPH, Executive Director and Founder
- Jeff Chubb, Program Manager