On a sunny, breezy, mid-week January day in 2022, five of HRTC’s staff met at a bank parking lot in Oakland.  The purpose of the meeting was bittersweet:  Jeannie Little, LCSW, Founder and Executive Director of HRTC since 2000, was passing the financial stewardship of HRTC to the newly minted Leadership Team:  Maurice Byrd, Celia Sampayo-Perez, Anna Berg and Nancie Jann.  We were physically closer together than we’d been for some time; COVID masks on, awkwardly and perhaps anxiously, sitting around a drab bankers’ desk signing names, showing passports, IDs, birth certificates.  It was a formal, very “Western,” financial process that still managed to feel ceremonial.

It’s a big deal for the leaders of an organization, let alone its founders and the pioneers of harm reduction psychotherapy, to transition out of active leadership.  And, of course, it’s a weighty honor to receive that baton.

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