Excellent question. Skills and capacities for folks who are supporting our workers, supporting people's experience. I would say a very good understanding of drug use. Um. And also an excellent understanding of how poverty it impacts people's lives. We use trauma informed a lot, I think sometimes without actually understanding what it means. But. I really like understanding. That people come with a story, and that that can often impact how people engage with institutions and authority figures or people perceived as authority figures. And also, you know how it might engage with work. And I would say flexibility. An ability to listen, I think. Often we have like rigid program deliverables or expectations from the funder side. But as support folks, we need to embrace flexibility and look at. Working. In consultation and like with the people we support and working with the employees who are hired to bring the expertise of their lived experience to a targeted role. And I think another one would be like a deep understanding of how stigma works and how stigma can impact a workers experience in an organization and a program. There's been a lot of embraced by harm reduction by different agencies and programs. I do think that there's still a lot of. Discriminatory behavior and. Sort of confirmation bias practice against. Workers who? Have to be like are explicitly hired into a role where they're out about their history of substance use or homelessness or sex work versus workers who don't have to disclose in order to engage and work. When you're leading teams with folks that are on it that have a variety of lived experience, I think that it's really important to have someone leading or guiding that also carries some of those same lived experiences. And I know that they're not always going to be the exact same. But I feel like that's a common ground and I think that there's there's a way that you can connect with people in a different way when you two share similar experiences in your lives. And I think that's the natural human reaction to meeting somebody that we're looking for what's different and what's common about us, right? So I think that just having that understanding really, really impacts our reach workers differently than someone they know that hasn't experienced any of those things and doesn't understand the complexities of being a person with little experience regardless of what it is. So like, there has to be. Some sort of like, I've been through some of these things before because you're actually assisting people in navigating systems, not only for themselves but for other people in the community. And you're modeling that right. We know that there are some programs out there that don't treat people the best, right? So people really appreciate that when they're like, you know, I've tried a couple of these programs. This was really, really, it was a good one. It was a safe one and like, maybe not that one, right? So. It's a lot of trust building. It's a lot of mentorship. And just like being with that person and seeing them for who they are and like guiding them and like, let's figure out a plan. What do you want to learn? Like what do you want to do after this? Because this isn't the end of the road. Like this is where I started my journey. So if you want to start moving in the same direction or similar direction, then I might be able to help you, like figure out how to navigate. Those things. 
Done Recognizing Speech I think it's important that the person first of all that's a facility or managing those programs. Believes in a harm reduction approach, believes in community LED outreach. You know what I mean? I think that you know, for myself, someone that has really grown with them, this kind of work, it really I really give the outreach workers that I've met through my work they credit to allow me to expand my knowledge around how to best support community and to really allow the team to. Be the ones to drive the discussion and the outreach and the way you know because they're the first contacts with communities. So you know, they, they're, they're teaching us and they're you know, they're telling us what community means you know. So I think it's very important that we support them in that process. Allow them to take us an initiative in like outreach strategies when it comes to working with larger populations and diverse communities, you know, so. You know, and making sure that we're, we're validating their personal experience as we validate other people and other work experiences. I'm really, really involved with trying to get people cash in their pockets because I recognize like if they sometimes, if people work too many hours, then they get cut off of their health benefits from OWOROSE and then they're stuck in this place where they're like working and making some money, but then they can't afford their medications and things like that. So then it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So I don't know. Like I would really like to see people with lived experience being paid more like essentially what we're providing is consulting services. We have such a complexity of different people on the outreach, you know what I mean? And what. They all have different issues than they come from different communities and different layers of, you know what I mean, identity, all these different things. So it's really important, you know, that we understand. Those different layers, there are different communities when we're doing outreach. Kids we're not, even though they made our beef from the sex work community, their experiences differently depending on their race, their class, their social location. And we've got to be mindful of that or even, you know, people that use, you know, people. Some people have more privilege than others. We want our agencies to advocate with funders as well, like we want. Ongoing supports around grief and trauma and loss, that's cumulative. We've seen a little bit of that in the HIV sector, you know, really led by AIDS Provement Resilience Project Ontario, and we've had this like cumulative. Deaths and grief through the overdose crisis, the drug poisoning crisis. And before that, like before it really started peaking. You know, the lots of the folks we work with die so early. I mean, the average lifespan for someone who's homeless is quite low and especially like for someone who's done time, so. Umm. The understanding that that also impacts work, I think or agencies often. Give the bare legal minimum, like 2 days off, 2 sick days for people, a lot of people in. Quote UN quote peer peer work. You know, positions targeted for folks with lived experience. May have underlying health conditions, may need like days off mental health days, may need days off, you know, because of withdrawal medication adjustments. Just needs days off because they're sick and don't want to come and work and expose other folks to that. But people come in because they need the money. And I think as programs and agencies, organizations, we can do better by offering more sick days, paid sick days. We don't have to give the bare legal minimum. I think we can advocate with funders to raise the pay. $15 minimum wage is really exploitative, especially in areas where the living expenses are quite high, and that's rural and remote. And urban areas as well, like the housing vacancies across the province are super low. Across this country and. You know, I think my friend AJ talks about this. You know, we see peer work in HIV, PCP work in mental health and in harm reduction drug using sectors. Those are three legal definitions of disability. We've created this model that's actually quite exploitative of people with disabilities, that's quite underpaid and and we frame it as liberatory and empowering. So I think if we want to frame it that way, we actually need to consult more with people in positions we're hired to bring their expertise with lived experience and ask what people need, what agencies find it challenging to keep staff on who use drugs. And, and I don't think this is a failure of individual employees, drugs. It's a failure of imagination and it's a failure of accommodations and a failure of policy and support people complain about. A glass ceiling, like for folks coming into work. In these targeted positions, I often people seem like excited, really love it. And the folks have been doing the work for quite some time and and battling a lot of credentialism, professionalization of harm reduction, and then also complaining about being kind of caught in this glass ceiling where they can't break out of. Low hour, low wages, precarious work. So 10 years ago I was an outreach worker. I was new in Toronto, I was getting paid $11.10 an hour and I was eating from the food bank and from the from the what's that other delivery that people drop off food like I was? That's how I was surviving and renting a room at 500 bucks a month, so like. There's only so much rice you can eat. I find oftentimes people who. Who have lived experience in their they're out there working. They don't, they don't. They don't necessarily have permission or give themselves permission to use the skills that they're trying to support other people with. And really getting more intentional about self-care. As best they can within the context of. Their economic depravity like so it like I acknowledge that piece it's it's a really it's a ****** system that we're putting people into but but you know so creating a Wellness plan anybody that I work with and we work with is within the context of their well-being and and economic well-being is well creating a Wellness plan. Helping them access this supports that they might need to be able to stay well whether that be physical activity mindfulness but something to get rid of the empty there. I call it their **** can or they're ****** committee and stop it from taking over. Giving them some skills to be able to do that is also a really important element. Our biography becomes our biology and. And what's important about that is, is maybe as we're looking at and talking to funders, we're helping them to also understand that any doctor that I go to, I get them to learn about aces because that'll help them to understand why this person has type 2 diabetes, why this person has cancer, high blood pressure, blah, blah, blah, it because there's a high correlation and I I score 10. Out of 10. So I'm theoretically screwed. Joke, but but what it means for me is I have to really make sure that I'm I'm doing this stuff. I'm taking care of my nervous system. I'm I'm not ruminating. And although I I ruminate but that therapy gets done and and I do my check-ins that kind of or tune up cycle. I thought it was support system around them, you know what I mean? To be able to I need to talk to someone and not feel that they could, this is going to affect their employment. There's this kind of like Tier 2 tier system within agencies where peer workers are not looked at as staff, right. So you know, they're not, they're not in larger meetings, they're not getting benefits, you know, there's so much, there's so much locking with them, the resources that they should be having. So like when I look back at the sewer project for the last three years and me taking that mentorship, mentor position, this is what we need. We need a position. I think all agencies in the position that really works in all those different areas. That's how peers are feeling supportive, you know what I mean? And you know, like would like Stephanie's dad. A lot of peers have complex lives. You know, we got to remember they're coming from the community. That's why they're peers. Right. So we have to understand that, but not dismissed that they're not as qualified as someone in the agency. That's the case manager or a manager. They have a wealth of knowledge and experience. So it's really vital for the, you know, for the agency to keep programming moving, to know what is going out in the communities, what's happening in the communities and how we can best serve the communities. People learn in different ways. So say putting a person in a training for half a day or a whole day. Like unless you keep the conversation going about it like in the following days after, which is normally a trick that I try and implement like OK like what happened yesterday. Would like, you know, and we start talking about it and then we look things up and then we keep going. And then it actually like it starts embedding itself into memory because we've been talking about it all week. And when we don't have that conversation after training, like, I mean, I'm guilty of it. I forget some stuff after I've been in training all day. Sometimes by the end of the day, you're like, OK, like, I'm so down, I can't. So even, like when we go over some of those trainings afterwards and have those conversations, you know, like a team member. Fully remembering some part that another person didn't and then, oh, remember this part? No. What was that about? And then explaining it and just like, and demonstrating that knowledge by being able to repeat it back to me and explain it to me in your own way has been really helpful for trainings as well. And I remember going through a workshop where somebody disclosed that
 they used trucks and that they've been homeless and that they've done sex work. Oh my God, people can, like, talk about this and it can actually, like, benefit folks. Um, and so that's like, yeah. And then I just started doing it. And and so now I'm trying to support other people to, you know, keep some levels of privacy. Like some, some folks when they're new and outreach roles, they just, like, everything comes out and then they feel really, really, really vulnerable. And so, like when we get started, we have a lot of chats about like you get to decide what people know about you. You have to be really aware of the audience. Like, you're going to get asked to speak at a lot of conferences and universities, and like, is that what you want to be affiliated with? Unconscious empathy is probably the biggest cause of vicarious trauma. When when we start to be held hostage by someone else's nervous system. And so helping people to not, you know, to. We always say walking people's shoes. I say stay the **** out of their shoes like their shoes understand their shoes, but if you walk in them too long, you'll have compassion fatigue. If that makes sense and I'm not saying be cold, please don't hear that but but but if if we walk in every client shoes. Um, it it could be a short career. There's been an embrace of crime reduction in Toronto specifically. That's where my knowledge base rests. But a lot of agencies like talk about embracing harm reduction, but it's not limited to handing out kits and giving out naloxone. It's actually like a framework that where you look at like your policies and practices, not just reforms and intake forms, but also how are we hiring people, how are we engaging in professional development for staff? How are we supervising staff around their engagement around harm reduction and how they embrace it. You know, and that harm reduction also includes, like, hiring people with limited experience of drug use.