Organizational response to escalated or harmful events must include consideration for the community of people who witnessed or were otherwise impacted by the situation. It’s extremely important to be as transparent as possible and to make next steps, timelines, and expectations really clear to everyone involved.

Organizational response might include an all-community meeting, informing people about what’s going on and making space for people to vent about how they’re feeling. Long-time harm reduction leaders say that in the middle of a crisis, you are at a crossroad as an organization; you can either use it as an opportunity to heal and pull in your community thereby strengthening it or it can be the thing that fractures it. But whatever you do, be cautious, because escalated or harmful situations can have a way of getting out of hand and harming more than the people immediately party to them.