The Harm Reduction Cafe is a community development project from HIT

We've started seeing a disinvestment in harm reduction in the UK.

Services have been told that if they keep 'Harm Reduction' in their title they won't get funding.

Specialist needle programmes in many areas are being closed leaving only pharmacy based provision available (with the best will in the world pharmacy services can't do everything a specialist service can, they're already far too busy)

We decided to start the cafes as a way of reinvigorating the original grassroots activism that .

The original idea for the cafes came out of a similar idea from the skeptics movement. Skeptics hold regular "skeptics in the pub" meetings where they meet to discuss the latest science research, activism and socialise.

The skeptics movement has many parallels with harm reduction especially when it comes to promoting evidence based approaches.

Organising back in the early days was very slow. You needed to already know about people before contacting them. All done via phone or mail.

This meant that organising was mainly localised and creating campaign materials was likely to have been expensive.

Since the Internet organising has become far easier. Using social media allows us to find like minded people with ease as get messages spread internationally as soon as we 'broadcast' them.

With online collaboration tools, wiki's and forums putting together high quality information is easier than it has ever been.

The harm reduction cafe site allows anyone to start and promote their events.

With the site we've given you a whole range of tools, including:

Guides on getting a cafe started

Posters to help you promote

System for setting up your own cafe page.

All these are free to use and adapt to your own needs.

There have been harm reduction cafe events in many cities the first one ever held was in Liverpool.

The first Belfast event had 89 people registered, we took over the top floor of a bar.

The harm reduction community is very tightly knit in Belfast but everyone was surprised at how many people they'd never met before.

We've also had cafes in:

Derby, Barnsley, Grimsby, Walsall, Bedford, Swansea, Vilnius (Lithuania), Melbourne (Australia) and Bounemouth.

1. Arranging cafes for the night before events can help encourage people to come and meet speakers informally

2. Pub or cafe? Avoid running in service buildings as this puts workers in a position of power.

3. Do you want/need formal speakers

4. The site provides free to use posters