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Caty Simon

Leadership Team Member/Narrative Development Director/Development Director
National Survivors Union/NC Survivors Union/Whose Corner Is It Anyway, Massachusetts

Caty Simon has spent 20 years in the low-income rights, psychiatric survivors’ rights, sex workers’ rights, and drug users union movements. She is a leadership team member of National Survivors Union (NSU), the United States national drug users union. Caty is also a founding co-executive director of Whose Corner Is It Anyway, a Western MA harm reduction, mutual aid, and organizing group by and for low-income, street, and survival sex workers who use opioids and/or stimulants and/or experience housing insecurity. She is the Director of Narrative Development at NC Survivors Union, the flagship affiliate group of NSU, leading Narcofeminism Storyshare, a project disrupting stereotypical narratives about people who use drugs through autobiographical story development. From 2013 to 2020 Caty was co-editor of Tits and Sass, a seminal media outlet by and for sex workers which was featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Jezebel, Gawker, and the New Inquiry, to name a few. She is first author of a commentary in the International Journal of Drug Policy on union members’ experiences as drug user organizers doing community driven research (CDR) and an editorial in a health justice and overdose crisis supplemental issue of the American Journal of Public Health, “The methadone manifesto: treatment experiences and policy recommendations from methadone patient activists.” She has extensive experience as a research and intervention consultant representing people with living experience of drug use and drug treatment, and has worked with the Yale Program of Addiction Medicine, the COVID-19 and Substance Use Data Collaborative, the Baystate Hospital Emergency Department, and the University of Kentucky’s Department of Behavioral Science, among others. Caty recently sat on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s harm reduction steering committee, defining harm reduction and its principles, precepts, and metrics for the federal agency.

Presentation(s):