There are good news stories, and there are bad news stories. Both provide good grist for the mill at a community newspaper. On the one side are the positive tales of local boy makes good variety. A dominant performance by a group of local lifeguards, perhaps. The stories about leaked trail documents and cocaine busts have their place as well.

Of course, there are always those stories that deserve a shade of gray rather than to be painted by the numbers of a simplified dichotomy, a black, or a white. HIV West Yellowhead’s situation is one of these stories.

There are many elements that fit into the positive category, especially considering the group’s activities in Jasper.

With 27 new volunteers in Jasper, HIV West Yellowhead has a base of 40 people in town who are willing to give their time to help the overworked staff achieve their aims. This strong group is helped along by the Volunteer Incentive Program, which now boasts more than 85 donors.

“It’s been about a month since the program started taking off,” said executive director Andrea Watson. “That’s partly because Kelly Skehill has come on as volunteer coordinator and she’s local and everybody loves Kelly. She’s a real leader in the community, she’s studying sexual health at university and she’s just been fantastic for us.”

Skehill started working for HIV West Yellowhead on May 2, and six days later Emily Brossard began her term as harm reduction coordinator in the office.

“Ever since then, my life has been just a dream,” Watson said. To make matters even better, the organization’s board approved dipping into the budget reserves to fund more hours for all three workers this summer.

“It was like Christmas Day when the board approved that,” Watson said. “Things are going so well, there are days when I get to the office and I can’t get even get in because there are so many people.”

A growing group of volunteers, more hours to spend on the job, and excellent working relationships with partners like Community and Family Services, in no small part thanks to Jasper’s groundbreaking Community Team approach. It sounds like life is good, and indeed it is, until Watson starts talking about the remaining communities in HIV West Yellowhead’s area of responsibility.

This is where the story starts turning from a good news tale into something more nuanced.

In Hinton, Edson and Whitecourt, HIV West Yellowhead has only four volunteers. Total. It’s hard enough to ask Watson and Brossard to do the work that is required in all four communities on a budget of approximately $70,000 per year, but a real lack of allies in the region isn’t helping matters at all.

Consider the roadblocks Watson has run into in her efforts to gauge support for a needle exchange program in Edson, a town with a burgeoning problem with intravenous drug use. Watson has simply been trying to lay the groundwork for a needs assessment, something that would show whether or not an exchange centre was even necessary. 

“The drug action coalition in Edson barred advocates from the group from speaking about the needle exchange in public,” Watson said. “We really need to find and empower champions to do some of the work.”

A regional strategy on needle exchange was one of the outcomes that came from the harm reduction conference hosted by HIV West Yellowhead and the Jasper Adult Learning Council at the Palisades earlier this month. The second day of the session was intended to lead to strategic plans in several areas, but in the end, only the group that discussed the needle program ended up making much progress, Watson said. It’s a bit of a microcosm of HIV West Yellowhead’s efforts in general.

“The whole reason for the conference was to implement harm reduction into our communities, to see what it would look like,” Watson said. “We had three groups and two of them didn’t get very far.”

Now, Watson and Brossard plan to make presentations on harm reduction to the other communities in the region. They hope that by educating drug action coalitions and other potential partners on the philosophy behind the approach, they might be able to influence some shift in attitudes towards people who use drugs or engage in risky sexual behaviour.

“Harm reduction is… respectful and non-judgemental,” Watson said. “It’s all about giving people the tools to be safe while they engage in risky behaviour.”

A pervasive attitude in other communities is that those behaviours ought to be actively discouraged, and any efforts toward harm reduction are seen as facilitating and perpetuating the harmful behaviour itself.

“The committees in places like Edson need to be educated. Our work in these other communities is just starting to get off the ground this year.”

There’s a long way to go yet. In Jasper, the Survival Guide is an accepted part of the services provided by Community Outreach and HIV West Yellowhead, and Watson thought it might be a good idea to introduce the concept to the human resources staff of oil companies working in Hinton. The public health nurse that was organizing Watson’s meeting with the oil companies nixed the idea, at least for now.

Negative, judgemental attitudes towards people who use drugs or engage in other risky behaviours doesn’t help the situation, Watson said.

“You need to be able to involve target populations in your programming and decision-making,” she said, pointing out a pamphlet on safe needle use prepared by and distributed for people living with drug addictions in Edmonton. “If you have a group that you’re trying to reach, let them tell you what information to include.”

The drug “explosion” in Hinton, Whitecourt and Edson is a popular topic in the media, and while Watson is far from suggesting that the situation isn’t as bad as it seems, she simply wishes that coverage wasn’t so dehumanizing to the people caught up in that scene.

“Media plays a very big role in portraying people as horrible drug users,” she said. “Ideally we’d like to see a promotion of communities rather than the ‘war on drugs’. A lot of people don’t even realize that, yes, we all have choices, but often other people are making these decisions for some people. Drug use shouldn’t define people. They are people who use drugs, not drug users.”

While she might be frustrated at times by the intransigence of the groups she has to work with around the region, Watson knows that patience is a virtue. A cautionary example has been provided by HIV Wood Buffalo in the Fort MacMurray area. When that group did a project on oil sands workers, drug use and the booming sex trade in the area, they went straight to the media with the results. In the aftermath, oil companies don’t want anything to do with people coming in to do further research or even harm reduction activities.

“I just think that things like the survival guide or our orientations would be very positive,” Watson said. “I think it’s going to be years before we make any progress. It’s like any change. It doesn’t happen overnight.”