Shayla joined Release after spending the last two years at an East London homelessness charity, managing a drug and alcohol outreach team. Originally from Baltimore, Shayla moved to the UK in 2019 to complete an MSc in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, producing a dissertation on harm reduction’s role in drug user subjectification in the UK.
Prior to this, Shayla has been working in the harm reduction world since 2015, at centres for people who use drugs and sex worker projects in three cities in the USA (Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City) and in Shanghai, China. Shayla’s particular harm reduction skills are working with people oppressed by patriarchy, people who use methamphetamine, and people who trade sex.