As part of a community art project for IOAD 2025, our Special Projects Coordinator Jackie Brittain asked the community for and compiled the contributions into this beautiful zine: ‘Good Grief: A Zine by CHR Participants, Staff, Friends + Supporters’.

It began during a group hosted by Reframe Health Justice, and it grew into a space for reflection, care, memory, and connection. The zine’s own language frames it as a collective offering shaped by vulnerability, generosity, and love, and it invites people to sit with grief without having to carry it alone.

This project was imagined as a communal grief zine because grief is never just individual. It moves through families, friendships, neighborhoods, and communities, especially when loss has touched so many of us in so many different ways. Across the pages, people shared art, poems, prompts, memories, and reminders to rest, breathe, reach out, and tend to themselves and one another.

What comes through most clearly is the kind of care that makes harm reduction matter: belonging, dignity, support, honesty, and love. The zine holds sorrow, but it also holds laughter, resistance, hope, and the everyday acts of staying connected. It reminds us that community care is not abstract, and that creating together can be one way to honor people we’ve lost while also caring for the people still here.

We are deeply grateful to everyone who contributed their voice, art, time, and trust to Good Grief. This zine exists because people showed up with tenderness and courage, and because a community made room for grief to be shared instead of hidden. That spirit is at the heart of Cochise Harm Reduction’s work: reducing harm, increasing community care, and making space for love.