Harm Reduction

My experience as a social worker has taught me important lessons about how families, communities, and society best function to reduce harm. As a devoted Course student, I look for philosophies in the world that most closely resemble the Course’s own ideas for reducing harm and changing the world. The liberatory practice of harm reduction is a concept that teaches how communities and kinship networks can best thrive without carceral or institutional power to reduce harm in our lives. 
Activist and abolitionist, Shira Hassan, offers the following definition:
“Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy and set of empowerment-based practices that teach us how to accompany each other as we transform the root causes of harm in our lives. 
Liberatory harm reductionists support each other and our communities without judgment, stigma, or coercion. We envision a world without racism, capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, ableism, transphobia, policing, surveillance, and other systems of violence. Liberatory harm reduction is true self-determination and total body autonomy.”
Social, political, and economic theories designed to bring structural changes to society through social action often find embodiment in the world’s great spiritual traditions, including A Course in Miracles. We each embody this goal in our own way.