This Women’s History Month, we’re celebrating the women of harm reduction who provide lifechanging, lifesaving services every day here at Prevention Point Philadelphia (PPP). Tamica Matos joined PPP as an Integrated Health Care Case Manager in June 2024, but she was already familiar with our services and community. For the three years prior, she worked with Drexel’s TIARAS (Trauma Intervention to Optimize PrEP Among Women Who Inject Drugs), which conducted outreach onsite at PPP. TIARAS is study that uses contingency management—or financial incentives—to help women adhere to PrEP effectively and keep themselves and others safer and healthier.
In the Integrated Health Care Case Management (IHCM), Tamica works to connect high-needs individuals to the care they need to survive. These diagnoses range from psychosis to severe depression to substance use disorder, and most of the participants face multiple diagnoses.
“We help them engage in primary care and escort them to appointments. We make sure that if they are interested in recovery, we get them into recovery services,” Tamica explains. “Then we follow through and help them get good aftercare, ensuring that they can get into a halfway house or sober living community, so that they're not just completing treatment and going back out to the stressors that produce substance use in the first place."
Advocacy is another key component of IHCM, ranging from asking providers clarifying questions while accompanying patients to appointments to ensuring incarcerated participants stay connected to social workers and maintain continuity of care.
Tamica has lived in or near Kensington for her whole life and says that working at PPP helps her continue to foster the strong sense of community that she knows from childhood. Growing up in Fairhill, her family came into Kensington for everything from shopping to getting their nails done to going to the bank.
“My family is from this community, so giving back to the space that I came up in is really important,” she says.
Like many of PPP’s staff, Tamica’s life has been touched by substance use disorder. Her aunt lived and worked on the streets, relying on a syringe services program in the 1990s, while her grandmother struggled with alcoholism until passing away at age 61. As the oldest granddaughter, Tamica stood by her grandmother throughout her struggle.
“I learned very young how to be a harm reductionist and how to support people where they are,” Tamica reflects.
From her many years of experience working with women in the Kensington area, Tamica has gained deep insight into their unique challenges. High rates of trauma among female-identifying participants, Tamica says, create a “complexity of care,” meaning that it is difficult to get someone to meaningfully engage in recovery once they leave the protective space of PPP for a space where they no longer feel safe.
“Our women should know that we care about them every time they walk through the door,” Tamica emphasizes. “We must have unconditional positive regard, no matter what challenges they bring to us, because oftentimes the challenging behavior that we have to address has a lot to do with the trauma they're experiencing day-to-day. To me, working with our women requires a little bit more in terms of emotional support, empathy, and truly meeting them where are there.”