NC Survivors Union Inc

On August 31, 2025, Louise Vincent, the revered founder and executive director of N.C. Survivors Union, passed away. The board moved swiftly to help the organization through the following transitional period, and plans were made for transition planning, contracting strategic planning consultants to hold an in-person convening in the first quarter of 2026. Don Alan Jackson, Vincent's partner, ultimately became executive director in her stead. In 2025, NCSU managed many innovative direct service grants, including a contract from the county to continue our buprenorphine service partnership with telehealth buprenorphine provider Boulder Care; RHAPSODI, a grant which allowed us to partner with local drop-in shelter the Interactive Resource Center; RODEO, a grant which allowed us to set up pop-up distribution points throughout the nearby city of High Point; as well as a grant from the National Coalition of Mental Well-being in which we mentored newer organizations on our longstanding harm reduction knowledge and upstream overdose prevention mechanisms. We also managed a grant from the state which allowed us to create a layman's sanitized wound care room for participants with xylazine wounds and other soft tissue infections to access supplies and knowledge on caring for them, as well as to deepen our drug checking activities on our FTIR machine. NCSU's story sharing and stigma disruption project, Narcofeminism Storyshare, presented in Manchester, UK at the Contemporary Drug Problems Conference in August 2025, the second time an abstract of ours was accepted at this conference, producing much productive networking with critical drug theorists and other organizations led by people with lived experience globally. Finally, in November, at a pre-convening for both NCSU and the national drug users union, National Survivors Union, at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference, National Survivors Union leadership team members shared memories of Vincent. The Narcofeminism Storyshare team also lead attendees of the pre-convening in an exercise entitled #IAmLouise---to share stories on medical stigma against people with lived and living experience of drug use and treatment, the very thing which Vincent and others in NCSU leadership believed killed her.