---

Plugs in the Clubs is an ongoing campaign with Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers, a San Francisco based non-profit that focuses on hearing loss education and prevention for musicians and music lovers. The main focus of the project is to increase earplug usage among concert goers through a combination of top-down policy and bottom-up educational campaigns. In 2014 we crowdfunded an independent audit of the San Francisco “Ear Plug Ordinance” that requires all large San Francisco venues to have earplugs available. To read more on this study, read our paper in Canadian Audiologist or poster presented at American Speech and Hearing Association (2016) . Since the publication of this study, we have worked with the San Francisco Entertainment commission to bring all large San Francisco Clubs into compliance with the ordinance, and always have earplugs available for their patrons.

We also continue to table at various events across the Bay Area, where we hand out earplugs and talk to concert-goers about hearing health and noise induced hearing loss. My personal philosophy around harm reduction in recreational settings is to give people the information that they are either missing or purposeful ignoring in order to lead them to take preventative action. This may sound simple, but I have talked to an astonishing number of concert-goers who genuinely do not know about the harmful effects of sustained noise exposure. By talking to concert-goers and handing out informational pamphlets on hearing health, we are striving to give concert-goers information that motivates them to protect their hearing at every concert they attend.

---