Richard Rainville started on what would be day 17 of the journey that is Réseau ACCESS Network, just after its opening in 1989.
Now, more than 30 years later, Rainville is retiring, leaving behind him an agency that has continued to adapt, change and grow to serve the needs of the vulnerable populations of Sudbury.
On the first day of his first year of high school in 1972, Rainville would meet his best friend, a person he would remain friends with for years after. However, by the mid-1980s, Rainville heard the worst news from his friend.
“He told me he was living with HIV,” said Rainville. “And I was devastated.”
Having left the north at the time, Rainville said he soon found himself “called back to the rock,” and soon after, found his calling.
The board of the Réseau ACCESS Network came together in 1988 to hire an executive director. That director was tasked first with hiring a support services worker. He hired Rainville. Rainville worked part time as the funding was negotiated, then took the role on full time for the next decade, working each day with people living with HIV/AIDS, and just about every other struggle you could imagine.
Rainville describes the early days plainly. “Those were hard days, and I think one of my primary roles, basically, was to help people come home to die,” he said.
The bright lights of a larger and perhaps more inclusive city drew the youth away, but they were forced to return to Sudbury when they contracted HIV, which at the time was grossly misunderstood. The early treatment, if a doctor was willing to, would wreck the bodies of those already facing the virus, and was largely unsuccessful. People were simply given a death sentence upon diagnosis.
“My role was to try to reconnect them to family, if that was an option, and often it was not,” said Rainville.
He said they would try to get clients connected with volunteers who would assist them in any way they could, but many were there to simply be with someone as they died at home. Rainville said the service at the former Sudbury General was a challenge, with the ignorance surrounding the virus leading people to avoid even treating those who were suffering.
“I can recall going to the hospital and somebody's tray of food was left at the door, because the staff member didn't understand and was too terrified to go into the room,” said Rainville. “So the person wasn't eating because they had no energy to get to the door. People think that happened elsewhere, but it happened in our own communities.”
That stigma would extend to those who worked with the sick.
“We heard many times, ‘why are you working with those people?' The idea that you must be living with HIV, if you're working there, that was always something,” said Rainville. “For me, it didn't really matter, because I knew better. And I would say that that's probably been the biggest blessing for me was all of the voices that I've heard. The stories that were shared with me, what people were able to tell me, actually made me who I am today.”
Rainville said in the early years, there were no other like-minded services in the community to rely on.
“They often, themselves, created barriers for those who they served,” he said. “I can recall going to an office with one of our clients because they were challenged trying to get the money that rightly should go to them.”
While the client wasn’t having luck, a well-placed ally did the trick.
“It wasn't until I pushed my business card through the hole in the glass and everything was arranged. And that experience just showed me that, you know, why do people have to experience ongoing trauma and barriers when it's not necessary?”
Rainville said it has always been his mission and that of Réseau to “meet where people are at,’ to try and find out what their needs are as opposed to telling them what their needs are.
“We needed to create that relationship, which for a lot of folks took a lot of time; we don't want to impose: we develop programs, we develop services, and we want to make them available to people. But we don't say you have to do it.”
It is this approach that has aligned so well with the principles of harm reduction, relatively new to formal practice but one that grassroots organizations have employed for many years.
“When we opened in ’89, we were very task-oriented,” said Rainville. “We knew the population we were working with.” But not long after, others began to knock on the door for support. “We were having women come who had nowhere else to go, we were having people who use substances, and had nowhere else to go,” said Rainville. “So we started working with marginalized folks right from the beginning.”
In 1991, they received funding specific to harm reduction, ensuring that people can take risks while mitigating that risk to themselves and others, ensuring the best safety available at the time. It is not about stopping the behavior, it is about education and safety without having to force change that is often impermanent.
“Now, it is the bulk, really, of the work that we do,” said Rainville. “It certainly has changed the organization in many ways.”
In the last few years, Reseau has developed a peer engagement program, encouraging people with lived and living experience to teach and learn from others, and through that, potentially modify some behavior that might limit new transmissions, said Rainville.
“And we learn how to modify our programs to better suit the needs of people who can use them.
We continue to do that now with the building of the new supervised consumption and treatment site.”
Rainville said the site will not only ensure that those using substances can do so safely, but that they can access other services they may not be aware of.
“Treatment might be an option for some, but even being able to use (substances) in an environment that's non judgmental, that has proper staff to make sure that overdoses are happening.”
“We're trying to keep people alive.”
And now, as he retires and looks back on his career, he is surprised how far the world has come. Now, if a person living with HIV carries a low viral load, that is, the amount of HIV in the blood they are considered ‘undetectable.’ That viral load is less than 40 to 50 copies/ml and is therefore not detected by standard tests. When a viral load becomes undetectable, it prevents the transmission of HIV.
Now, not only can someone with HIV live a long and quality life with the help of treatment, they are not going to transmit the virus to anyone. It’s become known as U=U, Undetectable=Untransmitable.
When asked if he thought it would be someone he would see in his life, Rainville said no, not really.
“We were working with people who were dying,” he said. “And I often think back, because I used to go to people's funerals, folks that I had supported in one way or another, and I would go to the funeral and come back to the office and there's somebody new. So it seemed like people were being replaced, and for a long time, that was the norm.
But thanks to the work of people like Rainville and the Reseau ACCESS Network, attitudes changed, science changed, and lives changed.
And now that it is time to retire, to rest, Rainville is looking forward to spending time with his husband and family, as well as his two dogs: brand new Miss Violet, who loves her new life, and Miss Olivia, who is 14, and not all together keen on Miss Violet.
Jenny Lamothe is a reporter with Sudbury.com. She covers the diverse communities of Sudbury, especially the vulnerable or marginalized, including the Black, Indigenous, newcomer and Francophone communities, as well as 2SLGBTQ+ and issues of the downtown core.
