Tag: Community Engagement

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).

This session will showcase how AIDS United’s Melanated Movement Fund grantees are responding to the needs of aging Black women across the diaspora by implementing innovative stigma-reductive and community-engagement approaches in two distinct communities.

In this presentation, we share results of our outreach efforts to engage cisgender women for HIV prevention services, including PrEP.

Imagine a world where every individual, regardless of their past, has access to essential healthcare services and the support they need to thrive. For returning citizens living with HIV, this is not just a dream—it’s a necessity. The Intervention Services Program (ISP), part of the DC Health’s HIV AIDS Hepatitis STD Tuberculosis Administration (HAHSTA), is on a mission to transform this vision into reality.

The San Francisco Principles 2020 builds on the 1983 Denver Principles to highlight the critical needs of long-term HIV/AIDS survivors (LTS) as they age with HIV. This important statement brings attention to the linked problems of aging, unfair health access, and how systems often ignore marginalized people within the LTS community.

There is limited programming focused on the health and wellness of long-term survivors of HIV. With people living longer and their needs shifting, the number of resources that are available and accessible to seek care or even social interactions becomes scarce. The Long-Term Survivors Hub (LTS Hub) was created to continue to nurture and foster social engagement among older adults who have lived, worked, and fought for this community.

This presentation examines how housing precarity and systemic bias shape clinical encounters with queer adolescents of color. Drawing from direct clinical practice, supervision, and education within urban community settings, it highlights the ways traditional care models often replicate inequities through rigid policies, pathologizing language, and a lack of intersectional awareness.

Transgender Empathy Training is an interactive, community-centered educational program designed to cultivate cultural humility, deepen understanding, and expand institutional capacity to support transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people. Grounded in trauma-informed care, intersectional analysis, and lived experience, this training moves beyond basic terminology and policy compliance to build genuine human connection and sustained allyship.

In 2022 in Alabama, youth age 13-24 made up the majority of chlamydia and gonorrhea cases, and nearly a quarter of new HIV diagnoses, illustrating the need for STI prevention efforts aimed at this population. Incarcerated youth represent a group more vulnerable to HIV/STI infection than youth in general. The UAB Family Clinic has partnered with the Alabama Department of Youth Services to provide HIV/STI education confidential HIV testing to youth held in detention facilities across the state of Alabama. In 2024, the UAB Family Clinic provided comprehensive HIV/STI education to approximately 350 youth across 3 sites, 268 of whom opted to be tested for HIV.

This presentation explores strategies for effective LGBTQIA+ health promotion and community engagement amid a shifting sociopolitical landscape. Drawing on recent case studies, grassroots initiatives, and community-led research, we examine the ways in which LGBTQIA+ individuals and organizations are responding to policy rollbacks and social hostility. We highlight inclusive health interventions, mutual aid networks, and coalition-building as mechanisms for advocacy and care.

This SYNC session will lead attendees through the OUTSafe curriculum and resources, offering providers in the field an essential tool to address older adult victimization and a guide for creating safe spaces and safer institutions for older LGBTQ+ adults.

In this conversation, we expand the frame to ask: What do we mean when we say chemsex? Who gets included, and who doesn’t? What does that reveal about or conceptualiztion of chem sex and the risk involved? We’ll explore how people of all genders and sexualities engage in sex and substance use, and how experiences of disability, chronic illness, trauma, and marginalization shape those choices. We’ll look beyond the typical substances to include alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, mushrooms, and other drugs that are often excluded from chem sex conversations. We’ll ask: What is a substance? What is sex? And how do race, gender, class, and ableism shape our assumptions about “risk,” “pleasure,” and “safety”?

This session centers on using research, community engagement, and social innovation to address these systemic inequities. Drawing from the qualitative study Exploring Interventions to Improve Healthcare Access for LGBTQ+ Individuals, it highlights trauma-informed strategies from organizations like the Los Angeles LGBT Center. Their peer-led, culturally responsive models and harm reduction frameworks offer promising approaches for transforming service delivery and improving outcomes.

Holy Cross Health in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is advancing health equity through a comprehensive, community-based approach to HIV prevention and care, STI and Hepatitis C screening, and LGBTQ+ health. Broward County remains one of the nation’s HIV epicenters, with 579 new diagnoses in 2022, far exceeding the national average. Despite this, 96.2 percent of people living with HIV in the county know their status, and 80.8 percent are linked to care within one month. Holy Cross Health’s initiatives, such as community outreach, HIV self-testing, and culturally competent education, are designed to meet the needs of LGBTQ+ individuals who are disproportionately affected by these conditions. The program is led by community advocates and LGBTQ+ healthcare professionals who step beyond traditional clinical roles to engage directly with the community. This session will explore the program’s design, implementation, and measurable impact, offering a replicable model for other health systems.

This session explores the emerging evidence supporting yoga and other healing modalities as a complementary harm reduction tool, particularly in underserved or high-risk populations. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, community-based programs, and trauma-informed frameworks, it underscores alternative healing modalities potential to serve not as a replacement for clinical treatment but as an accessible, empowering adjunct that supports individual agency, healing, and long-term well-being.

Queen City Harm Reduction (QCHR) is the only organization expressly centered around harm reduction principles and syringe access in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, where the city of Charlotte is based, and seeks to minimize the harms associated with substance use and other intersecting conditions such as sex work, justice involvement, and homelessness. QCHR proactively educates peers and the community on drug user health promoting prevention of infectious disease, overdose, and compassionate care.

The Empowerment Circle is a peer-led recovery support group serving individuals impacted by substance use, trauma, HIV, and systemic health disparities across the broader community—including LGBTQ+ populations, returning citizens, older adults, and people with lived experience of homelessness. What makes this model unique is its inclusive approach: while centering recovery, it intentionally brings together diverse participants in a shared healing space.

Cool Kids Carry Narcan is a rural overdose prevention initiative led by Berkshire Harm Reduction, a program of Berkshire Health Systems in western Massachusetts. Designed to address geographic and racial inequities in naloxone access, the project currently installs and maintains 124 public NaloxBoxes while pairing distribution with community training and stigma-reduction campaigns.

‘Out of Gender Conversations’ is an interactive training and workshop developed to offer insight, awareness, and care guidance for those providing care for LGBTQ+, gender variant communities and people.

Hepatitis C (HCV) is a curable disease, yet many patients remain untreated due to lack of awareness, outdated perceptions, and barriers to care. This project aimed to identify and link untreated HCV RNA-positive individuals to care within a large, not-for-profit health system in Virginia.