Sarah Whipple is the Community Engagement Co-Director at Yuba Harm Reduction Collective, a worker-led syringe service program serving a county in rural Northern California. She is also a community organizer for the Sacramento Sex Workers Outreach Project, a Steering Committee Member of the California Syringe Exchange Programs Network, and a Board Member for the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness. In 2024, Sarah received the Jude Byrne Emerging Female Leader Award from the International Network of People Who Use Drugs and the International Network on Health and Hepatitis in Substance Users.

Sarah’s core responsibilities at YHRC include providing direct harm reduction services through a mobile distribution program, MAT navigation, social media, supporting a street medicine clinic, and arranging trainings and community partnerships. She launched the area’s first ever drug checking program and first gender affirming supply distribution program. In 2025, she started a national network of worker-led harm reduction programs.

Sarah also led the creation of meth harm reduction kits that contain over fifty items to support participants with sleep, nutrition, skin picking, safer use, hydration, dental health, sexual health, overamping, and more. To accompany the kits, she designed a coloring book which contained harm reduction tips and advice for meth use. Sarah also designed a separate kit to support people experiencing withdrawal symptoms while stopping or pausing meth use.

Sarah created one the most followed harm reduction pages across social media platforms, which amassed over 140,000 followers and 3 million likes creating harm reduction education and storytelling content. She contributed to the creation of the Ethical Storytelling Roadmap created by the International Network on Health and Hepatitis in Substance Users which teaches journalists and researchers how to ethically tell stories involving people who use drugs.

The global harm reduction movement faces high rates of burnout as workers are tasked with responding on the front lines of multiple crises, often with low pay and minimal benefits. Burnout is often treated as inevitable, but it can be prevented when organizations put time and resources into worker wellbeing. In this presentation, Sarah Whipple will share burnout prevention advice from Yuba Harm Reduction Collective, a syringe service program serving a rural area of California, USA. Committed to supporting wellness beyond lip service, YHRC implemented policies such as organization wide equal pay at a rate significantly above the living wage, a 32 hour work week, unlimited paid time off, wellness stipends, a worker led non-hierarchical model, conflict resolution practices rooted in restorative justice, and much more. This presentation will challenge attendees to see burnout prevention as a responsibility of organizations, not individual workers, and provide concrete strategies to increase worker wellbeing and retention.