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Overview

The People's Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA) is a Seattle-based nonprofit incorporated in Washington in August 2007. It operates a flagship needle exchange and drug-user-health site at 4548 Brooklyn Avenue NE in the University District, plus a second fixed site, mobile outreach vans serving King and Kitsap counties, and a statewide mail-order Naloxone program. PHRA is governed by a unique bylaws rule requiring 51 percent of board members, 51 percent of staff, and 51 percent of volunteers to be active drug users or program participants. It is, by its own description, a peer-run organization.

PHRA was founded by Shilo Murphy (now publicly known as Shilo Jama), Tom Fitzpatrick, and Jeff Corey, all veterans of the original U-District Needle Exchange. For its first fourteen years it operated as a sub-million-dollar scrappy syringe exchange. Then federal harm reduction money arrived, and the budget tripled.

The Money

PHRA's revenue grew from $1.18 million in fiscal 2021 to $3.08 million in fiscal 2024. That is a 3.7x increase in three years, almost all of it driven by government grants. In fiscal 2024, contributions and grants accounted for $3,076,721 of $3,079,230 in total revenue. Earned revenue was effectively zero. Program services brought in $2,588. Investment income was $813. Inventory sales lost $892.

Source: IRS Form 990 filings, FY2014 through FY2024 (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, EIN 35-2307112; CauseIQ profile).

Where the Money Comes From

The Schedule B donor list on a 990 is redacted on public versions of the filing. PHRA's public 990s list a handful of identifiable private grantors (NASTAD $75K, Liberty Hill Foundation $20K, donor-advised fund pass-throughs in the $8K to $25K range), but those add up to less than $130K of a $3M revenue base. The other $2.9M is almost entirely government money, most of it not yet broken out in any public source we have located.

The likely flow, based on timing and grant program structure:

Locking down the exact dollar figures requires three things: a USAspending.gov pull on EIN 35-2307112 for federal awards, public records requests to PHSKC and Seattle HSD for contract documents and dollar totals, and an IRS-direct XML pull of PHRA's 990s to extract the Schedule B donor list. We are filing those now.

Leadership

Executive Director Laura Wirkman earned $90,669 in FY2024. She was hired in 2022, holds a master's in nonprofit leadership, and lists 25 years of nonprofit experience and 18 years of management experience. ED compensation at roughly 3.4 percent of expenses is unremarkable for a nonprofit of this size. There is no executive compensation red flag.

The story is at the founder layer. Shilo Murphy / Shilo Jama served as Executive Director from PHRA's founding through 2021. He is a self-described drug-user activist, profiled in KUOW under the headline "Heroin Saved My Life," profiled in OZY as "This Drug Activist Doesn't Want Addicts to Stop Using, Himself Included," and a regular author at Filter Magazine. He is also co-founder of the Urban Survivors Union, the national drug user union.

In 2021, Jama's reported compensation dropped to $6,302 for the year, while Shantel Davis, also identified as Executive Director that year, was paid $61,000. By 2022, Laura Wirkman was Executive Director at $70,000. The 990s document a mid-year founder departure with no public explanation. There is no press release, no news coverage, no documented dispute, no lawsuit, and no public board statement explaining the transition. Jama remained on the Washington Secretary of State governor roster.

Current Board

Per the FY2024 990 and the current Washington Charities Program filing:

• Jeremy Beckford, President (officer)
• Vivek Chaudhary, Secretary (officer, since 2021)
• Tom Fitzpatrick, Treasurer (officer, co-founder, original U-District Needle Exchange)
• Monte Levine, Director (board only, on since 2013, twelve consecutive years)
• Patricia Sully, Director (board only, also affiliated with the Public Defender Association and LEAD)

Of those five, only the first three are listed as officers on PHRA's Charities Program filing. Levine and Sully are seated as directors but do not hold operating titles. The Sully appointment is notable. Patricia Sully is a known Seattle harm-reduction attorney with longstanding ties to the Public Defender Association, which administers LEAD King County. PHRA and LEAD are governance-adjacent through her seat. That is not a conflict on its face, but it is a coordination point in the harm reduction policy ecosystem worth tracking.

The Other Two Highest-Paid Employees

PHRA's Washington Charities Program filing names three employees as receiving the greatest compensation: Laura Wirkman, Lisa Al-Hakim, and Zelda Oppenheim. Wirkman is documented in the 990 at $90,669. Al-Hakim and Oppenheim do not appear by name in PHRA's public 990 Part VII (officers, directors, and key employees over $100,000), which means each is paid below the $100,000 threshold but ranks in the top three of the organization's payroll. Public information on either employee's role inside PHRA is not surfaced through the IRS filings or the Charities Program record. Both are open identifications worth following up.

Financial Preparer

PHRA's Washington Charities Program filing identifies the organization's financial preparer as Samuel Dahlin, owner of Rising Sun Accounting, mailing PO Box 25726, Seattle, WA 98165. A $3 million nonprofit drawing approximately 99.9 percent of revenue from federal and state grants is having its financials prepared by a small private bookkeeping practice rather than by an independent audit firm. There is no public-record indication that PHRA has commissioned a full GAAS audit. Federal grants over $750,000 in a fiscal year typically trigger a Single Audit requirement under 2 CFR 200, which a small bookkeeping practice does not perform. Whether PHRA has a Single Audit on file, and from whom, is an open records question.

The Church

PHRA's flagship site at 4548 Brooklyn Avenue NE is not a clinic, a storefront, or a community center. It is Christ Episcopal Church, a parish of the Diocese of Olympia. The needle and pipe exchange operates from the church property on Tuesday and Thursday evenings (5pm-7pm) and Friday and Sunday afternoons (1pm-5pm). The church publicly markets the relationship on its website navigation under "PHRA at Christ Church."

The internal URL slug for the church's harm reduction page is copy-of-uw-campus-ministry. The page replaced, in the church's content management system, what had previously been a UW campus ministry page. That is a remarkable substitution to make visible in your own URL structure. A parish that once ministered to University of Washington students chose to repurpose the campus-ministry slot for a syringe and smoking supplies distribution site.

The supplies distributed at the church property include, per PHRA's own published list at the U-District site: new syringes and injection equipment, "injection alternatives" (meth and crack pipes), naloxone, fentanyl test strips, nicotine replacement therapy, "harm reduction therapy kits," safer sex supplies, emergency contraception, hygiene products, wound care, food, coffee, and outdoor survival gear.

This is an in-kind gift from the Diocese of Olympia to a peer-run nonprofit that distributes drug paraphernalia. It is not unique to Seattle. National coverage in STAT News, Hep Magazine, and the Episcopal Cafe documents a growing pattern of Episcopal parishes hosting needle and supply exchanges. But Christ Episcopal in the U-District is among the most operationally active examples in the country, and the property donation is the reason PHRA's $3 million budget does not include rent. The Diocese of Olympia has not, in surfaced public reporting, addressed the question of what its parishes' harm reduction hosting arrangements look like at the diocesan governance level. That is an open question worth asking the bishop's office directly.

The Federal Precedent

PHRA's policy footprint is far larger than its budget. In 2010, PHRA started distributing crack pipes openly. In February 2015, PHRA became the first organization in the United States to distribute methamphetamine pipes openly, beginning at 25 to 30 pipes per week and scaling to 25 to 30 pipes per day by late 2015. The distribution of drug paraphernalia is illegal under Washington RCW 69.50.4121. Seattle Police and the King County Prosecutor's Office declined to enforce the statute. PHRA was never charged.

The model spread. By 2022, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's harm reduction grant program (SP-22-001) under the Biden American Rescue Plan included "smoking supplies" on its allowable purchases list, sparking a national news cycle around federally funded "safe smoking kits." PHRA was the working precedent. KOMO's national fact-check follow-up, which confirmed crack pipes had appeared in HHS-funded harm reduction kits in Baltimore, Washington, and Boston, traced the policy lineage back to organizations like PHRA. The line from a U-District alley in 2010 to federal drug policy in 2022 is real and traceable.

Operations and the Audit Gap

PHRA self-reports more than 27,000 participant interactions per year and a syringe distribution volume of roughly 170,772 syringes per month at the U-District site (about 2 million per year at one site alone, roughly 3 million org-wide using the founder's earlier public claims). PHRA reports a syringe return rate of more than 98 percent at its Kitsap site, and claims a return rate above 100 percent in some periods, meaning more used syringes returned than new ones distributed.

The CDC's published benchmark for "successful" syringe service programs is a 90 percent return rate. PHRA's claimed numbers are exceptional. They are also entirely self-reported by a peer-run organization. We have not located an independent audit, an academic validation, or a public PHSKC contract evaluation that confirms them. PHSKC contracts typically require return-rate reporting as a deliverable. Those reports are subject to public records request.

Federal Award Footprint

USAspending.gov shows exactly one direct federal award to The People's Harm Reduction Alliance in the eighteen years since incorporation: a $7,000 Economic Injury Disaster Grant from the Small Business Administration, dated May 2, 2020, during the COVID-19 emergency. PHRA is not a direct prime recipient of any SAMHSA grant, any HRSA grant, any HUD grant, or any CDC grant.

The other approximately $3 million per year is therefore flowing as sub-awards through pass-through entities. The most likely prime recipients are the Washington State Department of Health and Public Health, Seattle & King County, both of which receive SAMHSA harm reduction prime awards (including SP-22-001) and re-grant to local providers. PHRA is a sub-recipient.

This matters for accountability. The lever to restrict the scope of allowable purchases at PHRA is not a grant agreement with PHRA. It is the prime award held by WA DOH or PHSKC, the sub-recipient monitoring program at the prime, and the federal program officer at SAMHSA who set the allowable-purchases list in the first place. PHRA is downstream of all three.

Scale Comparison

PHRA is small relative to the Seattle homeless and behavioral-health-services peer set, but disproportionately influential.

PHRA is roughly 1/35th the size of DESC. But where DESC's policy influence is local and tactical (housing contracts, KCRHA appropriations), PHRA's policy influence is national and strategic. Their distribution model became the federal allowable-supplies list. That is a much larger policy footprint per dollar of revenue than any peer.

Key Questions

1. Why did founder Shilo Murphy / Shilo Jama's compensation collapse to $6,302 in fiscal 2021? What were the circumstances of the founder transition?

2. What were PHRA's actual reported syringe return rates in PHSKC contract deliverable reports for 2020 through 2025? Do they match the 98 percent figure PHRA publishes?

3. Who are the prime federal recipients passing SAMHSA money through to PHRA, and what is the dollar breakdown of PHRA's federal, state, county, and city sub-awards for FY2022, FY2023, and FY2024?

4. Does PHRA's distribution of methamphetamine and crack pipes comply with the terms of the SAMHSA prime grants funding it? Do the WA DOH and PHSKC sub-award agreements explicitly authorize those items?

5. Did SAMHSA know what its prime grants were funding at the sub-recipient level when it set the allowable-purchases list?

TBC Action

The Burnham Civic is filing the following on PHRA in May 2026:

The first finding will be the dollar split between federal, state, and county grant streams. The second will be whether the deliverable reports filed with PHSKC match the public claims about return rates, distribution volumes, and participant counts. The third will be whether the SAMHSA grant agreement explicitly authorizes the items PHRA distributes today.

Position

The Burnham Civic supports keeping people who use drugs alive. Naloxone distribution, hepatitis testing, wound care, and access to treatment are core public health work and we support funding them. We do not support a $3 million federally subsidized organization operating with negligible financial transparency, an unexplained founder departure, an apparent lapse in state corporate registration, and an unaudited claim of operational performance. We do not support the federal government using a Seattle nonprofit's distribution practices, including methamphetamine and crack pipe distribution, as the working precedent for a national grant program without acknowledging that lineage publicly.

If PHRA's own deliverable reports, federal grant agreements, and corporate registration confirm the public record, the organization can defend itself. If they do not, the responsible parties at PHSKC, Seattle HSD, WA DOH, and SAMHSA need to explain why an organization receiving federal money was not held to the standards every other federal grantee is held to.

If you have firsthand knowledge of PHRA's operations, contracts, or the 2021 founder transition, contact us using the form below. Confidentiality on request.

Accountability Series

DESC · Plymouth Housing · Catholic Community Services · Low Income Housing Institute · KCRHA · HDC