In a quiet office inside Health Brigade, Edward Peters talks about the city the way someone might describe a long, strange dream that’s familiar, unpredictable, and filled with people he still can’t stop caring about.
“I’m an HIV test counselor,” he says, “and my title is IDU Outreach Specialist.” IDU stands for injection drug use, but Peters makes it sound simple: “I go out into the community, to facilities, to wherever I can find people who might need help. Some come into the clinic, but a lot don’t.”
It’s not glamorous work. It never was. “Everyone’s not gonna come in to get tested,” he says. “So we go to them. That’s where the opportunity is, to meet people where they are.”
From Fan Free Clinic to Health Brigade
Peters’ story with Health Brigade goes way back, back when the place was still called the Fan Free Clinic. “When I was in high school, I needed a physical for a work permit,” he says. “Somebody told me about the Fan Free Clinic on Hanover Avenue.”
That was 1973 or ’74, and the clinic was still young, a radical idea then, free healthcare in the Fan, run by volunteers. “They did a lot for college students back then,” Peters says. “A lot of STIs and stuff like that. I went for a physical, but I never got it. I left before it was done. I was young.”
Three decades later, in 2003, he came back, this time as staff. “A friend of mine named Stewart was working with youth,” Peters recalls. “He needed someone to go into the community and do HIV testing among people who injected drugs. I was a former drug user myself, so I knew the environment. I wasn’t afraid to go in and engage in conversation.”
He laughs when he says it, not out of pride but understanding. “I was comfortable there. I wasn’t scared.”
That familiarity turned into trust. “People know me,” he says. “If I walk through a neighborhood, they’ll say, ‘Oh, Mr. Peters is coming by.’ They might want condoms, clean needles, or just to talk. They’ll ask, ‘What do you think about methadone?’ or ‘Where can I go for treatment?’”
A City in Waves: Cocaine, Heroin, Fentanyl
Peters has been doing this long enough to see whole eras come and go. “I’ve seen the cocaine boom, the heroin boom, and now fentanyl,” he says. “It appeared out of nowhere, and people started overdosing. Older users, folks who’d been using heroin for decades, they didn’t know what they were taking. They’d been using for years, and then suddenly they were gone.”
He remembers a study from the early 2000s. “We talked to 25 African American drug users in the community,” he says. “After a year, only two were still around. Some died. Some went to jail. Only one went into recovery. That’s just how it was.”
These aren’t statistics to him, they’re people he’s known, laughed with, lost. “I’ve seen a whole lot of violence and a whole lot of activism,” he says. “The community keeps changing, but the struggle, that part never really goes away.”
The Slow Bleed of Funding
“The hardest part now?” Peters says, after a long pause. “Funding. Or lack of it.”
“For me, it’s watching D.C. and the Virginia Department of Health take money away from individuals who may need services down the road,” he says. “They don’t understand what they’re doing. Because once that funding’s gone, people like me can’t go into treatment facilities anymore. We can’t go out to where people actually are. And when that happens, those folks, the ones who really need the help, they’re just gone. They disappear.”
“The only time anybody hears something different,” he says, “is if they come to the medical clinic and get tested. Or they might have symptoms, hepatitis C, HIV, and then they find out. But if I can’t go out there to reach them first, they’re not getting that chance.”
Then there’s the other side of it, the fear. “A lot of people think if they go to the hospital, the police are gonna be called,” he says. “They think their name goes on some list, that somebody’s gonna check and see if they owe child support or got a warrant. They think, ‘If I go in, they’re gonna lock me up.’”
“They don’t know that don’t happen, not unless it’s a gunshot wound or child abuse or something like that. But they don’t believe it. So they stay away. They won’t get screened for nothing. Not HIV, not hepatitis, not anything. They just live with it until it’s too late.”
“That’s why I go out there,” he says quietly. “Just by me walking through different communities, I can stop and engage individuals, pass out supplies, talk to them. Sometimes I’m the only person they’ll even listen to. I’m that one person they trust, the one who’ll actually show up.”
Second Chances and the Long Game
Peters’ compassion comes from hard experience. “I was a drug user myself,” he says. “What changed me was jail. I had to do something different when I got out.”
He says it plainly, without drama: you either change, or you don’t. “I’d been arrested,” he says. “And when I got out, I said to myself, I gotta do something different. Because if I keep doing what I’m doing, I’m just gonna die.”
That was more than twenty years ago. Since then, he’s helped people try to make that same kind of change. “The best part of my job,” he says, “is when somebody I’ve known for a long time decides to stop using, even for one day. Just one day. Or when they do something different, maybe go to the movies, go vote, go visit family, anything.”
He’s seen how small shifts ripple through families. “When one person changes,” he says, “the people around them see it. Their kids, their brothers, their mothers, they start thinking maybe they can, too. That’s when you know something real is happening.”
“You just want them to do something different. That’s it. Something different than yesterday.”
Health Brigade’s Open Door
Peters says it plainly, without ceremony: “We serve the least.”
He lets the words hang there a moment before repeating them, like a promise. “Our doors are always open. Anybody can walk in, we don’t turn no one away. If we can’t help them, we’ll find somewhere that can. We can always have a warm handoff from somewhere else.”
“We’ve had folks come in with severe mental health problems, people you can tell have been turned away from other places,” he says. “We don’t deny them. We try to find somewhere for them to go, help them get services. That’s what we do, loving and caring.”
He’s seen every kind of person come through those doors, people fresh out of jail, people living under bridges, people who haven’t seen a doctor in years. “We’ve had people come in with hepatitis, with HIV, or just needing someone to listen,” he says. “And we help them, whatever we can do. Even if they just need a meal or a connection to somebody who’ll take their call.”
The phrase we serve the least isn’t just a slogan for Peters, it’s a way of life. “Our mission is to serve the people nobody else wants to deal with,” he says. “The ones who get pushed away, forgotten about, who don’t feel welcome anywhere else. We welcome them here. No judgment.”
“I’ve seen people come in crying, thinking nobody would help them,” he says. “And I’ve seen them leave, maybe not fixed, but seen. That’s what matters.”
For Peters, Health Brigade isn’t just a clinic, it’s a sanctuary, a rare place where compassion is policy. “It’s a family,” he says. “People come here because they know we’ll treat them like human beings. And that’s all most people want, to be treated like they matter.”
That might sound simple, but after half a century of epidemics, policy shifts, and entire communities written off, it’s quietly revolutionary. In a city where so much depends on who you know, Health Brigade stands as a reminder that help still exists for the people who don’t know anyone at all.
A Gem in Plain Sight
“I’ve seen a lot of different generations and changes,” Peters says. “From the cocaine boom to the heroin boom to now, to fentanyl. A whole lot of violence. A whole lot of activism. But Health Brigade’s still here.”
Still standing. Still serving.
For a city that too often measures its worth in condos and ribbon cuttings, Edward Peters is out there, day after day, reminding people that dignity isn’t a luxury. It’s a service, one that Health Brigade keeps providing, even when no one’s looking.
“Somebody’s got to,” he says.
And then he’s off again, back into the city that needs him.
Photo by Patience Salgado
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