The Mission
HRH413 is a queer and trans led harm reduction project rooted in community care, mutual aid and creative resistance. Operating out of Western Massachusetts (area code 413), we build safer spaces, share power and save lives. We are a direct operational response to a racist and classist drug war. Our mandate is to serve Black and Brown communities, people who use drugs and people who trade sex who are historically and rightfully distrustful of traditional fixed site public health programs.
Jess Tilley
co-founder
Jess Tilley is an architect of the modern harm reduction movement. With nearly three decades on the front lines as a practitioner, advocate and organizer, she does not deal in sanitized public health theory. She builds operational survival systems. She is the Executive Director of the New England Users Union (NEUU) and a globally consulted strategist dedicated to dismantling the racist and classist war on people who use drugs.
In 2012 she walked away from her role as Overdose Prevention Coordinator at the Cambridge Needle Exchange to co-found HRH413. The calculus was simple. Traditional fixed-site syringe programs were failing Black and Brown communities and people who trade sex. Those populations are rightfully distrustful of clinical gatekeeping. Jess built HRH413 to bypass the gatekeepers and put resources directly into the hands of the people fighting to stay alive.rustful of standard fixed-site syringe service programs.
Albie park
co-founder
Albie Park brings over 20 years of clinical and grassroots expertise to the project. He is not a nonprofit administrator playing at street-level work. He was one of the original counselors at The Stonewall Project in San Francisco (one of the very first outpatient harm reduction programs in the country).
While earning his Master's degree in social work, his research targeted a massive structural gap. He designed a harm reduction alternative to abstinence-only mutual aid for gay men using speed. After relocating to Western Massachusetts, he and Jess revived and pressure-tested that concept on the ground. That localized effort evolved into Harm Reduction Works (HRW). Today, HRW is a fully scripted, scalable mutual aid model that launched nationally at the Drug Policy Alliance conference in 2019. Albie proved that community care does not require institutional permission to scale.
