Missy McLean, ON

Missy joined the Board of Directors for Moms Stop the Harm (MSTH) in March 2021. She is a registered social worker whose practice is rooted in anti-oppressive, anti-carceral and abolition feminist frameworks. She currently works in a community legal clinic providing victim-survivors of gender-based violence with advocacy, family and criminal court support, crisis intervention, short-term counseling and wraparound systems navigation. She also works closely with marginalized residents who are experiencing discrimination, stigma and criminalization often related to their socioeconomic status, drug use, homelessness, psychiatric survival and/or other intersectional identities.

Missy is an active champion of MSTH’s three pills of Advocate, Educate and Support. She speaks frequently to community groups, as well as politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of government, about the organization’s work to challenge laws and policies that cause harm, including those laws that continue to drive the unregulated drug poisoning emergency in Canada. She also seizes every opportunity to share information about the importance of evidence-based prevention, treatment, and policy that is grounded in and guided by the wisdom, experience and expertise of people who use/d drugs. 

In 2021, under MSTH’s Stronger Together Canada initiative, Missy founded Holding Hope Northumberland, a peer support group for those impacted by a loved one’s drug use, and Healing Hearts Northumberland, a peer support grief circle for those who have lost a loved one lost to toxic drug poisoning or related harms. Missy is proud to have recently transitioned leadership and facilitation of both groups to original group members who stepped forward to take the facilitator training and build capacity within their community.

Missy is also co-founder, with her friend and comrade Ashley Smoke, of TweakEasyCBG. Launched in March 2023 as an unsanctioned overdose prevention site, TweakEasyCBG exists and persists as an unfunded, volunteer-driven response to the unregulated drug crisis. Guided by the mentorship of TweakEasy cofounders Mkwa Giizis and Carolyn King in Nogojiwanong, documentation like CAPUD’s This Tent Saves Lives, guidance from the Ontario Network of People Who Use Drugs (ONPUD), and oral histories like the Crackdown podcast, to name just a few, TweakEasyCBG upholds and is guided by Indigenous harm reduction principles and practises, and is part of the family that is E-Yaagwaamzijig (Those that are careful*).

*Translation provided by Elder Shirley Williams