Board of Directors
President
Corey Ranger
Based in unceded Quw’utsun Territory, Corey Ranger (he/him) is an uninvited settler on these lands. Corey is a registered nurse with extensive experience in street outreach, community, and public health nursing with additional training in project management and quality improvement. Corey has focused primarily on harm reduction since 2013 beginning in Alberta and now in British Columbia. At present, Corey is the Clinical Director at AVI Health & Community Services, a board of director at Canadian Drug Policy Coalition (CDPC), and a research and communications intern with the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC).
Vice-President
Sarah Lovegrove
Sarah Lovegrove is a Professor in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program at Vancouver Island University. She is a passionate advocate for harm reduction and people who use drugs in her community of Nanaimo, located on traditional unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. While her background is in Emergency Nursing, she temporarily left her nursing practice and the profession entirely from 2018-2022 to heal from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder incurred from her experiences at the bedside. Throughout that time, she volunteered alongside and in support of local drug user advocacy groups operating safe consumption and outreach services, served as the Chair of the Nanaimo Community Action Team (CAT), and has been a committed voice of advocacy at the local, provincial, and federal levels. She is an anti-racist/anti-oppressive, trauma-informed, intersectional feminist in life, practice, and teaching with an embodied understanding of how systems of oppression impact our capacity to offer and experience care. She understands harm reduction to be far more than a set of principles and practices, but rather as a way of being, a lens through which we see and move through the world, and as a radical act of love to keep people safe in a very unsafe world.
Treasurer
Kate Hodgson
Kate Hodgson is a nurse practitioner who lives and works on the traditional territories of the Tla’amin, Homalco and Klahoose peoples. She provides low-barrier primary care to people who experience intersections of substance use and precarious housing. She is an advocate for patient-identified treatment goals and improving access to substance use treatment options including prescribed safer alternatives to the unregulated drug supply in rural and remote communities.
Secretary
Meaghan Brown
Meaghan Brown (she/her) is a settler of Scottish, Irish, and Dutch ancestry and grew up on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples (Niagara, ON). She currently resides on traditional and unceded lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory (Victoria, BC). Meaghan is a Registered Nurse, nurse educator, and clinical leader with a primary background in community nursing roles related to mental health and substance use, harm reduction, homelessness, sexual health, and gender affirming care. In 2024, she completed her Doctorate in Nursing under the supervision of Dr. Bernie Pauly with the Canadian Managed Alcohol Program Study (CMAPS). She has been involved in local, provincial, and national projects on alcohol harm reduction in urban, rural, and Indigenous communities.
Regional Representative
(Pacific)
Kelly Davison
Kelly is a harm reduction nurse who has worked in two provinces and a variety of practice settings since 2013. In Alberta, Kelly worked in a rural acute care hospital setting, psychiatric emergency, and as a community health nurse with the Aboriginal Mental Health Team in Calgary. In BC, Kelly has worked along the continuum on inpatient units, psychiatric assessment and emergency, in residential treatment, and in the community as an assertive community treatment nurse and a nurse at Insite. In 2019, Kelly graduated with his MN and MSc in Health Information Science from the University of Victoria and has been working on his doctoral studies since 2020. Leveraging his knowledge of the continuum and nursing practice in settings along it, Kelly focuses his attention on structures, standards, and evidence as they relate to health equity and quality nursing care, working to understand the structural factors that create and sustain inequities and supporting nurses to address them. It is with a great sense of responsibility and humility that Kelly will serve with the HRNA as Western Representative until 2027.
Regional Representative
(Prairie)
Rachael Edwards
Rachael is a registered nurse with a passion for public health, harm reduction, and health equity across the lifespan. Rachael has spent the last 15 years working in community health, infectious disease, clinical education and shelter/street outreach programs practicing harm reduction, health promotion and humanitarian philosophies of care. Rachael completed a Master of Public Health and Social Policy from the University of Victoria in 2023. Rachael joins the HRNA board as the Prairie Representative.
Regional Representative
(Central)
Meghanne Hicks
Meghanne is a Harm Reduction Nurse who graduated from St. Francis Xavier University with her BScN and has been nursing since 2009. She has practiced in Nova Scotia (Halifax), Alberta (Calgary), and currently in Ontario (Kingston). She has worked in a variety of settings including hospital, virtual, and community healthcare including: Halifax Infirmary, Rockyview General and Foothills Hospitals, Safeworks Supervised Consumption site and Outreach, Kingston General Hospital ER, Addictions and Mental Health KFLA, Street Health Centre at Kingston Community Health Centres, Assertive community treatment (ACT) at Providence care Hospital. Her passion for working in harm reduction and health equity has lead her to her current role of Knowledge Mobilizer for the Ontario Harm Reduction Distribution Program (OHRDP). In her role with OHRDP she is able to support systemic learning and education for safer use of harm reduction supplies to the province’s harm reduction programs. By ensuring programs have the tools and resources they need around safer practices we create safer and healthier communities. Meghanne is excited to serve as the Eastern Representative with HRNA until 2027 and looks forward to bringing voices from all the eastern provinces to the table.
Student Representative
Leah Kleisinger
Leah Kleisinger is a third-year nursing student at Saskatchewan Polytechnic in Regina, Saskatchewan. She found her passion for harm reduction early on at the age of 16 when she started working at a pharmacy in Regina that specialized in addiction and mental health, Queen City Wellness Pharmacy. After years working there she decided in a career as a registered nurse and continues to work within the community whenever she gets a spare minute!
