Synchronicity

This presentation shares early findings from ANA\California’s LGBTQIA+ Equity in Nursing initiative, led by Advocacy Institute Fellows Dr. Bri DuBose (2024) and Misty Mandeville (2025). The taskforce—formed in January 2024 and composed of nursing leaders, clinicians, and subject-matter experts—designed a structured assessment to benchmark organizational culture, knowledge, reporting comfort, DEIB infrastructure, and hiring practices related to LGBTQIA+ equity.

Congenital syphilis is a completely preventable condition that imposes a significant clinical and financial burden on our current strained healthcare system. In response to rising infection rates in Miami-Dade County, Homestead Hospital (HH) implemented an innovative, Electronic Health Record-integrated Syphilis Screening Algorithm in 2019, embedded within its existing routine HIV and Hepatitis C testing infrastructure.

In today’s climate of burnout, fear, and fragmentation, leadership requires more than strategy—it calls for presence, relational courage, and embodiment. Leading from the Body introduces a trauma-informed leadership model rooted in somatic awareness and relational intelligence. This approach recognizes that trauma is not only cognitive—it is emotional, non-verbal, and stored in the nervous system. As such, healing and leadership must begin in the body. This interactive session explores how lived experience and embodied presence shape culture, relationships, and organizational change.

This session provides a five-step roadmap for integrating HCV care into primary care practice. Attendees will learn how to conduct reflex-based screening, stage fibrosis using labs or portable tools, select treatment regimens aligned with AASLD-IDSA guidelines, navigate medication access barriers, and monitor patients through to sustained virologic response (SVR).

Older adults living with HIV—especially Black gay men aged 50 and over—face compounding challenges including stigma, fragmented care, and under-resourced behavioral health services. This session highlights strategies from the Aging and HIV Institute (A&H), a California-based think tank dedicated to bridging HIV and aging service systems.

This interactive session explores the intersection of aging, race, gender identity, and sexuality through the lens of Black LGBTQ+/SGL individuals living with HIV. Drawing from lived experiences and frameworks like Aging While Black by Raymond Jetson, the session redefines aging not as decline, but as a site for power, healing, and systemic transformation.

StayWell Health Center serves as a leading responder to the overlapping syndemics of HIV, hepatitis C, STIs, and social determinants of health in the Waterbury, Connecticut metro area. Through a status-neutral approach, StayWell ensures that all individuals—regardless of HIV status—are connected to comprehensive prevention or treatment services without stigma or delay.

Radical Rapport is a dynamic, trauma-informed training/presentation designed to help harm reduction providers and health professionals build deeper trust with Black, Brown, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities. Through reflection, skill-building, and cultural humility, Dr. Vivid guides participants toward creating safer spaces rooted in affirmation, not assumption. This training centers identity, orientation, expression, plant medicine, and spiritual healing as vital to holistic harm reduction.

Integrating harm reduction conversations into primary care visits can help to provide education, resources, and support for behavioral change for the patient, their family, and their community. Patients are already considering their safety related to substance use and pain control but may not know all the facts or strategies to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Asking patients without judgment about how they control pain and use substances can open communication between patients and healthcare providers.

Us Helping Us, People Into Living, Inc., a Black-led, LGBTQ+-affirming health organization in Washington, DC, developed a harm reduction and capacity-building model rooted in health equity to address the opioid crisis. While naloxone distribution remains vital, we go beyond it by centering legal literacy, reducing stigma, and community empowerment.

Black Health’s Outreach Enhancement: Faith Based Organization Program (OEF) collaborates with faith-based organizations across the five boroughs of New York City to provide high impact HIV prevention services in geographical hot spots in communities of color where HIV infections are most heavily concentrated (as defined by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYCDOHMH).