As United Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence was felt in the Twin Cities this winter, many residents were forced to run quick and daring errands out of their homes to grab the essentials, such as food and toilet paper, often excluding safe sex supplies. The Family Tree Clinic, in the Stevens Square neighborhood of Minneapolis, helped fill this gap by providing safe sex kits to the food pantries that many of these residents darted to.
Lucia Frias-Wackman explains that people often exclude safe sex supplies, as some do not consider safe sex supplies a priority in their day-to-day life.
“Metro Surge really highlighted the hierarchy of needs and how, when thinking about sexual and reproductive health care, it might not be something that’s kind of at the forefront,” Frias-Wackman said.
But sexual health is health, she explains. Her colleague, Rebecca Driker-Ohren, offers another reason residents may have neglected their sexual health during the height of Operation Metro Surge.
“If someone has to go one step further than their food pantry to get birth control, they can’t do it,” Driker said. “Like, it’s just not accessible.”
Working together under the shade of The Family Tree Clinic, Driker-Ohren and Frias-Wackman help fill this need. Through the Sexual and Reproductive Health Services Grant, a roughly $7 million grant passed by the Minnesota Legislature, Family Tree Clinic can serve and assist members of the community.
A major benefit of this grant, Driker-Ohren says, is that there are not many restrictions on what you can do with the money.
“We can’t buy like a bounce house,” Driker-Ohren said. “But, we can figure out what kinds of condoms we want to buy, and we can spend gas monies in different ways. We really do have a lot of flexibility within our programs.”
This flexibility proved extraordinarily important for the Family Tree Clinic’s response to ICE. Driker recalls one instance in which someone texted the hotline asking for Plan B in the metro area.
Driker-Ohren responded to the text and delivered the medication herself.
“But like, that’s the kind of agility where, well, someone needs that,” Driker-Ohren said. “So I feel like that was a moment of real community connection.”
The community connection does not stop there. Every third Wednesday of the month, the Family Tree Clinic invites members of the community to make safe-sex supply kits.
Before this winter, only educators or organizations received these kits. In light of ICE’s presence in the community, the Family Tree Clinic started sending them out to individuals.
“We respond to people who are contacting the hotline,” Driker-Ohren said. “And, [there’s] a big push in getting these to food shelves.”
This Wednesday, another safe sex supplies kit building session was hosted. Jules Michaud, a graduate of Columbia University working at the University of Minnesota and doing research on the West Nile Virus, walked 10 minutes to the clinic to help prepare kits.
He saw the event posted on Instagram and said he has been meaning to volunteer at a kit-building night for some time now, as he sees the immense importance of promoting sexual health.
“People deserve to have access to supplies that will allow them to live as safely as they can possibly live,” Michaud said. “And anything that can provide access to that, we should be doing. Anything that’s being done that prevents access from that is bad for public health. Bad is maybe an understatement.”
Correction: A previous version misstated Rebecca Driker-Ohren’s last name. The correct last name is Driker-Ohren.
