Lived Experience Group
We want to hear from you
A core part of the Healing Cortland Project is supporting our community in making decisions about how to reduce opioid overdose deaths and related harms. We’re organizing an Opioid Task Force to be the community group that will look at local data and make decisions. That Task Force will have several workgroups that can focus on specific topics or areas, such as naloxone, medication for opioid use disorder, criminal justice, and lived experience.
We are committed to ensuring that the people most directly and drastically impacted by the opioid overdose epidemic have a meaningful voice in that decision-making process.
We’re putting together a group of folks with lived experience of substance use (people who use drugs, are in recovery, or have a close family/friend connection to substance use) to get their feedback on the current landscape in the Cortland area and on project decisions moving forward.
What’s working? What needs to change?
We want feedback on what it’s been like to live with and around drugs in the Cortland area. What works and what needs to be better (and how)?
- This group will include people who use drugs, people in recovery, people who have lost family or friends from overdose or other drug-related harms.
- The Healing Cortland team can then share this info with the broader Opioid Task Force in a way that doesn’t force people with lived experience to out themselves, to come face-to-face with law enforcement or legislators, or to prepare any written speeches or anything, unless they want to.
- People with lived experience are welcome to join or speak directly to the Opioid Task Force, but we don’t want to force people to do that, since we recognize it can be risky and hard.
- We’re picturing a group that meets every couple of weeks; come when you’re able but don’t feel pressure to come every time
- Our Community Engagement Coordinator, Aster, is also willing to meet individually to get feedback and perspectives if meeting in a group doesn’t work
- Our priority is making sure that the voices, needs, and perspectives of people with lived experience are central to Cortland’s decision-making around the overdose epidemic.
How to get involved?
If you are interested in getting involved in with the Lived Experience Group–or if you just have questions–you can get in touch with Aster at:
