Heather Tunold is a harm reduction educator, consultant, and facilitator & parent whose work is rooted in abolition, lived experience, and over a decade of frontline practice.

Having been street-entrenched in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside from a young age, after becoming homeless at 12, Heather’s understanding of systemic violence, drug policy, and survival goes beyond theory and embodies lived expertise on an intimate level.

Her early life was shaped by a tulmultous childhood of profound and often unthinkable trauma, much of it navigated alone, including experiences of systemic violence such as periods of solitary confinement during incarceration, endured in the context of survival. These realities continue to inform her practice grounded in dignity, relational care, and a refusal to look away from the conditions people are forced to navigate.

For more than 13 years, Heather has worked alongside people who use drugs across outreach, toxic drug response/overdose prevention, housing, community organizing, and peer-led initiatives. Heather’s work aims to resist the status quo of disposability, expectations to perform worthiness and invites folks into her worldview which challenges carceral and medicalized approaches to care. She centres harm reduction as a practice of autonomy, solidarity, and collective survival.

Heather now supports organizations, healthcare teams, and grassroots initiatives through consulting, facilitation, and training that move beyond policy into practice. Her approach focuses on naming what is often left unspoken within systems, shifting responses from charity and control toward dignity and liberation.

She is currently working toward her Master of Social Work degree and continues to build spaces, tools, and conversations that push toward a more honest, accountable, and care-centered world. Heather provides unique and tangible harm reduction education and organizational consulting rooted in dignity, structural analysis, and lived experience.

Her work supports leaders and teams in examining how systems such as prohibition, carceral logic, colonialism, and stigma shape the way institutions respond to substance use, poverty, and marginalization.

Rather than focusing only on individual behaviour, Heather helps organizations understand the broader social conditions that shape people’s lives, while offering practical tools that support autonomy, shared power, and community-centered care. She approaches this work with great depth and a passion for fostering lasting and profound impact.

Through education, dialogue, and reflection, she works with teams to unlearn assumptions, challenge dominant narratives, and build practices grounded in solidarity rather than charity.