The Mission Mobile Team moves one chair inside Gubbio

Nathan Kamps-Hughes, LCSW

Program Manager & Therapist

In early 2019 when HRTC was expanding our street-based mobile treatment services to the Mission and setting up shop on 15th Street in front of St. John’s Church (where the Gubbio Project is located), we could not have imagined that we were laying the foundation for future collaboration. But now, after six years, one global pandemic, and one contested mayoral race, our Mission Mobile program is evolving with the times. While we continue hosting the street-level clinic at 15th & Julian that we launched in 2019, we have recently deepened our collaboration with the Gubbio Project and are excited to have a weekly clinical presence inside St. Johns/Gubbio to complement our street-based work.

The motivation for this change was two-fold. On the one hand, the shifting local political landscape has resulted in a push-back against street-based services throughout the city, which has already impacted HRTC’s ability to serve other neighborhoods like the Tenderloin. On the other hand, the Gubbio Project recently expanded their service hours (yay!) and are now open for the duration of our weekly Mission Mobile site. This service expansion resulted in a significant increase in the volume of people spending time in the vicinity of 15th & Julian, and our visibility at this intersection has precipitated several unpleasant exchanges with housed community members who are under the impression that HRTC’s services are somehow responsible for this increase. So we reached out to the fantastic folx at the Gubbio Project to assess their interest in hosting some of the HRTC services previously offered on the sidewalk. And to our delight, Gubbio has welcomed us into their space with the radical hospitality that only true harm reductionists can provide. We now serve our delicious weekly meals from inside the Gubbio courtyard, replete with chairs, tables and ancient jade plants, which also doubles as a fantastic location to engage community members in Harm Reduction Therapy. Leveraging St. John’s wonderful space (with the gracious support of the Gubbio staff), has allowed us to do more with less, particularly since we are no longer responsible for sidewalk crowd control on 15th Street. For example, our treatment van, temporarily re-imagined as a supply transporter during the pandemic, has now been returned to its original purpose as a mobile therapy office, allowing us to maintain our clinical presence outside the Gubbio space and avoid any disruptions in service continuity.

And while much programmatic and political uncertainty remains in this current moment, we feel very fortunate to have expanded this collaboration with such a like-minded ally, and are excited to undertake a new chapter in our Mission Mobile treatment program.

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