All posts by : metzineres_editor

Today, June 2, the global sex workers’ movement commemorates a date born of struggle, dignity, and resistance. In 1975, more than one hundred sex workers occupied the Church of Saint-Nizier in Lyon to denounce police repression, violence, and the appalling conditions to which they were subjected.

Fifty years later, we are still here: organizing, creating autonomy, and building tools to support our strategies for survival and collective care.

This is a day of struggle against stigma, criminalization, and institutional violence. It is also a day to demand recognition of our human, labor, social, and health rights. From Metzineres, we want to focus on something very specific: access to information, self-care, and the ability to make decisions about our bodies, our drug use, and our work.

A Living Tool of Community Knowledge

A few months ago, during the Raval Festivities, we presented for the first time the draft of a tool that carries within it the pulse of this neighborhood and of the womxn who inhabit it: Polvos, calles y saberes. Autocuidado y estrategias de trabajadorxs sexuales que usamos drogas.

This material did not come out of an academic laboratory or from a table of experts detached from our realities. It was born from a collective process that combined informal conversations in the street, weekly assemblies at our space in the Raval, community paellas, and working groups created specifically to share knowledge, gather experiences, and shape this guide. The process began in July 2024 through training sessions, interviews, and fieldwork, with the support of researcher Livia Motterle, but always with the protagonists at the center.

From this process came 20 in-depth interviews and a document of more than 100 pages that gathers real strategies for survival, harm reduction, and the defense of rights.

Our way of collecting knowledge is collective and community-based. That is the key. We know that those who best understand what happens in a room with a client, on the street, or on the margins of institutional circuits are those who have lived it. That is why this material is also an exchange: shared experiences, situated learning, and reflections built among peers.

Information to Break the Stigma

Stigma and criminalization feed on a lack of information, on silences, and on taboos. Naming what we live through is also a way of caring for ourselves, organizing, and demanding rights.

This guide is not a closed document. It is constantly in motion and is updated with every new lesson learned, with every strategy we share, and with every conversation that opens up new questions. It is material made by and for sex workers, but also an invitation to continue weaving networks of mutual support and community resistance. Polvos, calles y saberes is a starting point, a travel companion, a conversation that remains open.

Sharing Knowledge: From the Local to the International

Our struggle does not remain only in the streets of the Raval. Over the years, many of us have built ties with peers from other countries who have done sex work in different parts of the world, carrying with us diverse experiences, knowledge, and strategies. One of the most powerful experiences was the first Sex Workers’ Summit in Colombia, where we were able to meet leading voices in the struggle from different parts of the world.

This project is rooted in an intersectional perspective: it does not segment, separate, or rank. It sees each person in their entirety. Because substance use remains a taboo subject for many sex workers, offering this material means opening a space for accompaniment and support based on real experiences, not on external formulas or moralizing views.

On this International Sex Workers’ Day, from Metzineres we demand the right to information as a human right, the right to work without criminalization, and the right to make decisions about our own bodies.

We invite you to read Polvos, calles y saberes, to share it, to discuss it, and above all, to journey through the knowledge that is born from the margins.

Today and always: nothing about us without us.

Download the guide in Spanish here.

This project was carried out with the support of Ajuntament de Barcelona – Directorate of Feminisms and LGBTI Services of the Management Office for Culture, Education, Sports, and Life Cycles.

We are publishing Metzineres’ 2025 report: a year in which we carried out 11,181 support interventions with 395 womxn —85 of whom arrived for the first time—, consolidated the Rights Space, and opened L’Arravalera. A community-based practice that shows that harm reduction is also housing, connection, health, and rights.

During 2025, we supported 395 women and gender-expansive people who use drugs and survive multiple situations of violence and vulnerability. Since the project began in 2017, we have supported a total of 748 womxn, 642 of whom remain connected to Metzineres today. These figures speak not only of activity: they speak of people, bonds, and a model that fills a gap no other resource in the area has managed to cover.

We have supported all of them in many different ways: sustaining Espacio Lluna 3 as an everyday home, going out into the streets where they are, defending them legally, providing health and psychological follow-up, facilitating workshops, organizing political advocacy actions, and caring for the neighbourhood in the Raval. We do this from an intersectional feminist, human rights, and full-spectrum harm reduction perspective, and through the Embedding of Peers: the model that places experiential knowledge and technical knowledge on the same level.

“2025 has been a year of high intensity. We have had to adjust opening hours due to financial pressure, but we have not given up what defines us: supporting without expelling, sustaining the bond when life overflows, and making decisions together with the womxn themselves. What the data show is that the model works —and that community is also public policy,” says Aura Roig, founding director of Metzineres.

What we did during 2025

• • 11,181 support interventions with 395 womxn at our premises on Carrer de la Lluna, 3, despite having had to close on weekends and public holidays since May due to lack of funding. 85 womxn arrived at Metzineres for the first time this year. There were days with 68 different womxn inside the premises in a single day.
• • We guaranteed access to basic and violated needs through Espacio Lluna 3: 9,652 accesses to food, 9,572 mutual support interactions, approximately 1,680 showers, 1,680 daytime rests, around 1,400 uses of the washing machine and dryer, 1,127 uses of self-care spaces, and 1,227 accesses to the clothes-swap wardrobe.
• • More than 9,000 consumption support interventions in the dressing room and courtyard; we carried out 55 substance analyses with Energy Control and distributed 6,900 condoms and self-care materials. No overdose occurred inside our spaces, although 16 were recorded outside the premises. This is no coincidence: it is the direct result of connection, trust, and ongoing support.
• • 390 health-related support interventions, including emergency care, primary care, and mental health, 285 of which were with sex workers and women engaged in survival sex. We strengthened follow-up on HIV treatment adherence for 44 womxn and carried out 36 preventive screenings on site.
• • 185 individual psychological support processes and 288 group support interventions, with active presence in crisis situations and episodes of acute psychosis, avoiding coercive interventions and involuntary hospitalizations whenever possible.
• • 1,487 legal actions with 178 womxn through the Rights Space: 641 consultations, 322 coordination actions, 320 support interventions, 26 legal representations in court, 67 prison visits, 33 multidisciplinary reports, and 21 requests for Community Service Orders. Since the beginning, 18 Community Service Order procedures have been carried out and successfully completed within Metzineres itself.
• •The street outreach team carried out 45 outings and 146 support interventions in different areas of Barcelona —Raval, Parc Joan Miró, Poble-sec, Montjuïc, Arc de Triomf—, reaching 35 womxn already connected to the project and 15 new people. They distributed 70 kits for smoked consumption, 85 for injected consumption, 45 naloxone kits, and 150 hygiene and intimate-care materials.
• • We consolidated the community technicians team: 30 womxn connected to the project since the beginning, 6 of whom participate in the Intervention Directorate, 6 provide support inside and outside the premises, 7 are workshop facilitators, and 3 take on representative roles. During 2025, they led 309 support interventions, 72 workshops, and 11 artivism actions. Two represented the project in Lisbon and Porto, and one in Pereira, Colombia.
• • We maintained a stable workshop programme: 48 Guerrilla Sewing sessions with 20 women, 35 Monologueando sessions with 40 women, 29 openings of the Metzitunning hair salon with 50 participants, and 11 feminist self-defence sessions with 10 women.
• • We opened L’Arravalera on Carrer de la Lluna, 20, as a cultural, training, and advocacy space where the MTZ CreActions find a home. It will be consolidated in 2026 with an ongoing programme of exhibitions, gatherings, and training sessions.
• • We strengthened neighbourhood ties in the Raval: we created the Neighbours’ Commission of Carrer de la Lluna, with three meetings already held, and took part in community actions such as Sou Llavor, the Book Fair, Barri cuida Barri, the Carrer Lluna neighbourhood festival, and the Raval(s) Festival.
• • We carried out political advocacy at local and international levels by participating in spaces linked to drug policies, harm reduction, and human rights, such as the Harm Reduction International Conference in Bogotá and United Nations spaces. We continue to be part of the EU Civil Society Forum on Drugs, the Women’s Council of Catalonia, and the Barcelona Municipal Social Welfare Council.

What comes next

In the coming months, we face concrete challenges. The first and most urgent: guaranteeing a stable space where we can continue doing what we do. The second: reopening on weekends and public holidays, because life does not stop during office hours. The third: consolidating L’Arravalera as a stable cultural and advocacy space in the neighbourhood. The fourth: continuing to demand more stable, diversified public funding frameworks aligned with the real timelines of community intervention.

In 2026, we will also premiere the documentary about Metzineres, a piece that tells our story from within: the voices of the womxn, the bonds, the conflicts, the humour, the hardship, and the strength of sustaining life on the margins.

The challenge is no longer to prove that the model works. The challenge is for what works to be able to continue: to have a roof, a budget, and time. For womxn not to have to start over every time the market decides or a grant is delayed.

📄 Download the full 2025 report (PDF)

📄 Defend Metzineres Collaborate with a donation, volunteering, or by signing the campaign for the space.
If you want to help us sustain this space of rights, care, and community, learn about the different ways you can collaborate with Metzineres here.

Every week, Metzineres’ interdisciplinary community street outreach team goes out into the streets of El Raval and other areas of the city to support womxn who are surviving multiple situations of vulnerability, violence, and housing exclusion.

The everyday violence, emotional burdens, personal impacts, institutional barriers, and stigma that womxn experiencing homelessness often face when trying to access services and resources mean that many are left outside standardized support systems and do not feel able to approach them.

The community street outreach work we carry out goes beyond providing holistic support, building bonds, listening without judgment, and creating relationships of trust based on respect, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care. It also means recognizing that each womxn has her own timing, needs, and survival strategies.

The support we provide is interdisciplinary and holistic. The team is made up of professionals from the social, health, psychological, and legal fields, as well as people with lived experience. This enables us to offer flexible responses adapted to each specific situation: from social and health support, emotional accompaniment, and legal advice, to coordination, referrals, and follow-up with other services linked to basic rights such as housing, healthcare, and documentation.

Many of the womxn we support carry bags, belongings, and life stories marked by violence, the feminization of poverty, and stigma. Street outreach allows us to reach them from a different place: through proximity, continuity, and recognition of their autonomy.

This approach also creates spaces for collective empowerment. Sharing information, experiences, and strategies among peers helps build support networks and community-based forms of protection and self-care. In this sense, the street also becomes a political space from which to defend rights and denounce the structural violence that cuts across women’s homelessness.

In Barcelona, women’s homelessness continues to be particularly invisibilized. Many women do not literally sleep on the street, but move through situations of inadequate housing, squats, temporary stays on sofas, or unsafe spaces. This reality is often left out of statistics and traditional care models. At Metzineres, we work precisely to make these realities visible and to generate appropriate responses from a feminist and community-based perspective.

As relevant project data, we highlight that in 2025, 395 different womxn were supported through the various sheltering environments deployed by Metzineres —89% of whom were experiencing homelessness and 79% of whom were roofless—, and 85 of them were new participants. This demonstrates the scale of this reality and the lack of specific spaces adapted to their needs.

Secondly, the implementation of the project has contributed to mitigating the risks associated with life on the street and the structural violence that particularly affects womxn. During this period, 45 outreach sessions were carried out, resulting in 146 direct support actions and reaching 35 womxn already linked to the organization, as well as 15 womxn who were not yet familiar with our project.

This support included active listening, needs assessment, guidance on available resources, and occasional or ongoing accompaniment to facilitate access to social, health, or legal services. The continued presence on the street has made it possible to sustain bonds with womxn who are often left outside institutional care systems and to facilitate gradual processes of connection with Metzineres.

The project has been developed with the support of Ajuntament de Barcelona.