About the Speaker

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Gillian Maxwell is a founder and executive member of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition (CDPC), and focuses her attention on community engagement, strategic planning and fund development. Gillian’s training is in mediation and negotiation, and she is well known in British Columbia as the host and facilitator of a number of public forums at Simon Fraser University’s Wosk Centre for Dialogue, as well as a speaker on harm reduction initiatives at international conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Gillian has been a member of the Vancouver Police Board and a Trustee of AIDS Vancouver, and during the 2010 Winter Olympics brought SafeGames2010, a large-scale harm reduction initiative, to Vancouver’s Olympic celebrations.

Gillian currently is a member of the Advisory Board of MAPS Canada (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), and a proud recipient of the 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

For several years, she served as the project director of Keeping the Door Open: Dialogues on Drug Use (KDO), a community-based coalition organising dialogues on problematic substance use to educate the public and inform public policy in Vancouver, and was the spokesperson for the Campaign for Community Safety to advocate for the permanent status of INSITE, the internationally recognised supervised injection facility in Vancouver.