Community Engagement Team
The Community Engagement program aims to reduce the barriers people who use drugs often face trying to access services. The program does this by collaborating with community-based organizations and other city agencies and through community interviews and qualitative data collection. There remain large pockets of the city where individuals who use drugs have few pathways into care. The Community Engagement team works with people in these neighborhoods to gather information on what barriers to care they face and how the Division of Substance Use Prevention and Harm Reduction can help them eliminate those barriers. Collaborators with SUPHR’s Community Engagement program also help to expedite entry into treatment facilities and provide case management for Philadelphians returning from incarceration who are at elevated risk of overdose.
In 2021, the highest unintentional overdose fatalities in the City were amongst Black Philadelphians. Fatalities were also concentrated in North Philadelphia zip codes with primarily Black residents: 19132, 19133, 19140, 19141 and 19140. The Community Engagement Program aims to reach these neighborhoods to collect information and provide resources to people who use drugs in culturally relevant and appropriate ways.
Earlier this year, the program’s first Community Assessment and Engagement Specialist, Dominique McQuade, began an outreach engagement strategy in the North Philadelphia community. She has built trusted relationships by becoming a consistent source of support, harm reduction supplies, and substance use information. Her presence in the community allows SUPHR to expand programming to specifically include populations at the highest risk.
Other Collaborations
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AR-2 launched as a pilot program in April 2019 after receiving federal grants from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The unit, composed of a paramedic and case manager, works in Kensington and responds to nonfatal overdoses when an individual refuses transport to an emergency department. They also accept “walk-ins” and community referrals. The team connects people to treatment on demand and provides a warm handoff to treatment facilities. They also distribute the medication used to reverse opioid overdoses, naloxone, citywide.
Read more about the AR-2 program.
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LEAP (Linkage and Engagement After Prison) is a partnership with Action Wellness. For the past 30 years, Action Wellness has been working with individuals incarcerated in Philadelphia jails. In 2020, SUPHR funded Action Wellness to provide case management for those at high risk of overdose upon release from incarceration.
LEAP is a voluntary program for anyone inducted on suboxone, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder, in the Philadelphia Department of Prisons. Case managers visit their clients behind the walls and continue providing services for 3-6 months post-incarceration. Upon release, each client is assigned a care outreach specialist who accompanies them on medical appointments, shopping trips, court dates, and other errands as needed. Abstention from substance use is not a pre-requisite for participation in the LEAP program.
Meet the team
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Annie Brogan, MPA
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT MANAGER
Annie (she/her) received her master’s degree in Public Administration from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where she focused on public health programming. She joined SUPHR in 2019. Her interests include addressing the harms of the war on drugs and the intersections of race, class, and drug use. Before becoming a public health professional, Annie was a history of medicine librarian, which influences the way she approaches her current work as she looks at evidence from the past that has led us to the current overdose crisis.
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CR Robinson
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST
CR (he/him) developed community engagement and organizing skills through volunteer work. CR began volunteering as a youth inspired by an idea that if people communicated in way that reflected our humanity and how we are connected, we could rise above the suggested racial divide. The volunteer work led to further training and then employment with a community and housing development non-profit. There he learned how to organize housing repair workshops, community festivals and advocacy demonstrations and discovered a passion for connecting people to much needed resources or resources that could help people help themselves. CR has spent decades engaging community and connecting them to resources through connecting loved ones together by facilitating a family prison visitation project, coaching park groups and connecting them to government and non-profit resources, and by connecting people to their democracy through facilitating many civic education workshops. CR is excited to continue to do what impassions him the most by connecting people to all the lifesaving and life sustaining resources that SUPHR has to offer.
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Dominique McQuade
COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT AND ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST
Dominique (she/her) is the SUPHR Community Assessment and Engagement Specialist. She began her role with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) in March of 2022, but has been working to provide harm reduction resources and education to low-income Black and brown communities since she moved to Philadelphia in early 2020. In addition, Dominique’s role now includes qualitative research and assessment. She works very hard to foster community relationships and create opportunities within populations most afflicted by the increasing overdose crisis.
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Wilfredo Laboy, PhD
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST
Wilfredo was born in Fajardo, Puerto Rico and as a young child, moved to Philadelphia, PA. Wilfredo is a husband, son, brother, father and grandfather. In long-term recovery from psychological, physical, sexual, substance and emotional abuse. Wilfredo earned a PhD in Streetology at the University of Autodidact and was the eponym of Badlandz. Wilfredo also spent 12 years in prison and through all that adversity, has managed to earn some accolades:
A.A.C.O. HIV/AIDS Certified Counselor
C.P.S.(Certified Peer Specialist),
C.R.S.(Certified Recovery Specialist)
Certified Phlebotomist
OSHA 30 Certified
Founder of M.A.R.A. (Medication Assistance Recovery Meeting).
Co-Founder of No Stones in Our Hands Ministry (Faith Base) 12 Steps meetings
Wilfredo has been working in the human services field for 20 years. He also served as a volunteer at Pro-Act, Prevention Point,(where he got employed) as well as with Officer Bo Diaz as a mentor at the 26th Police district working with the youth program.
As a reporter once asked Wilfredo, “What do you see when you look at the people here in Kensington?” Wilfredo responded: “As I look at all the faces on the street of Kensington, I only see one thing, HOPE FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL!"