Grace MacInnis Lecture by Micheal Vonn, the Chief Executive Officer of PHS

“Who the Hell Would Do this Work? Reflections on Supportive Housing and Harm Reduction in Unfriendly Times”

Public lecture by Micheal Vonn
November 15, 2023

Supportive housing and harm reduction are popular political footballs. But the delivery of services to the most needful has been fraught from the outset, even aside from the current iterations of political heat. Much of the regulatory, administrative and legal environment is ill-suited to the provision of services to the most vulnerable. The call of community is to ‘get creative’ and work in ‘gray areas’ to achieve genuinely low barrier services. However, the charitable sector is assuming an astonishing burden of risk and liability in trying to create and sustain services that are not provided for in normative models. The CEO of PHS Community Services Society reflects on current challenges and controversies in the provision of low-barrier services and what’s needed from those coming into leadership in the sector.


SPEAKER
Micheal Vonn is the Chief Executive Officer of PHS Community Services Society which provides supportive housing, healthcare and harm reduction for under-served people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Victoria. In 2003 PHS opened Insite, North America’s first legal supervised injection site. PHS is a leader in prescribed supply to combat the drug poisoning crisis and innovator in low-barrier service provision.

Micheal is a lawyer. She was the Policy Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association for 15 years. She has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Law and the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies where she taught civil liberties and information ethics. Micheal has an extensive background in issues ranging from national security to freedom of expression. She has been a collaborator on Big Data Surveillance, a multi-year research project led by Queens University, an Advisory Board Member of Ryerson University’s Centre for Free Expression and an Advisory Board Member of Privacy International.