Saving Our Own Lives

Saving Our Own Lives is an anthology of essays by long-time organiser Shira Hassan that fills the gap in documenting the essential practice of Liberatory Harm Reduction, one of the most important interventions of the 20th century. This collection tells the stories of sex workers, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour, queer folks, trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people building systems of change and support outside societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation.

This is a collective story of trans women of colour who, as sex workers and radical political organisers, created shared housing to ensure young people had safe places to sleep. It is the story of clean syringes, "liberated" from empathetic doctors' offices by activists—punk women of colour—distributed among injection drug users in squats in the East Village, alongside the early AIDS activists who made sure everyone knew how to use them.

It is the story of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords taking over Lincoln Park Hospital in the Bronx to demand and ultimately create community-accessible drug treatment programmes. It also tells of bad date sheets exchanged between sex workers in Portland, who created a data collection tool that changed how prison abolitionists track systemic violence.

At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, Saving Our Own Lives serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for the radical transformation of our world.