In This Issue
The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity.
I just returned from The 20th Anniversary ESSENCE Festival™ Presented by Coca-Cola® in New Orleans, where among other things, the Black AIDS Institute and the Louisiana Office of Public Health provided HIV testing to festival attendees. We tested over 1300 people—our most successful Essence Festival testing effort ever. This year, Greater than AIDS sponsored a session during the Essence Empowerment conference with Alicia Keys and moderated by Melissa Harris Perry from MSNBC.
The Essence Festival happened on the heels of National HIV Testing Day, held in partnership with Walgreens, the nation's largest drugstore chain, and Greater than AIDS. Walgreens tested over 10,000 people at 280 locations in 150 cities.
Now, we are in the final throes of preparing for the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne Australia and we want you to join us.
During this transition to a post-Affordable Care Act and post-biomedical intervention world, it is critically important that we raise the HIV science and treatment literacy in our communities. There is probably no better opportunity to improve and expand our knowledge and skill than the opportunity afforded by the International AIDS Conference. This is a chance for community health departments, clinicians and researchers to come together for both real and virtual town hall conversations on the latest scientific breakthroughs in the field. The Black AIDS Institute is proud to have brought you this info directly for the last sixteen years. We are excited to once again deliver this vital service this year.
There are four ways for you to participate:
1) Join us on Monday, July 21st at 12:00 pm EST, for a curtain-raiser webcast to find out what we think are going to be the important stories of the week. Go to www.BlackAIDS.org to view the webcast.
2) We're also turning the Black AIDS weekly into the AIDS 2014 Black AIDS Daily. We will provide you with real time news from the plenaries, sessions, global village, and all the social events delivered to your in box every day.
3) Join us at 12:00 pm EST on Friday, July 25th as we say goodbye to Melbourne. We'll wrap up our reporting from the conference with a webcast summarizing the major findings of the week.
4) Finally, virtual information is great, but nothing replaces old fashion face-to-face dialogue. We want to share our Melbourne experience with you in person, in your community. Starting on August 27th, The Black AIDS Institute, in partnership with the Black Treatment Advocates Networks, local health departments, ASOs/CBOs, clinicians, and local CFARs are sponsoring AIDS 2014 updates in 18 cities around the country. We are coming to a city near you. To find our when and where, go to BlackAIDS.org (a list of the cities and the dates are listed in this week's calendar).
Also, between National HIV Testing Day and The 20th Anniversary ESSENCE Festival, the Institute reopened our groundbreaking national survey of the HIV/AIDS work force. Because as my grandmother used to say, "You can't figure out where you're going, if you don't know where you are." We can't build the capacity in our communities to end the AIDS epidemic if we don't know what our science and treatment literacy is. The national HIV workforce survey is collecting state level Knowledge, Attitudes and Beliefs data. This data will help ASOs, CBOs and state and local health departments better understand the knowledge gaps in the HIV workforce and help develop the types of training and technical assistance we all want and need to do our jobs. Please go to BlackAIDS.org and take the short U.S. HIV Workforce Survey. It will only take 15 minutes.
This week also marks the fourth anniversary of the National HIV/AIDS strategy. We are clearly closer to achieving the goals and objectives of the NHAS, but our progress has not been fast enough or experienced evenly across populations or regions of the country. In the words of the late Dr. Maya Angelou, "When we know better, we do better".
Yours in the struggle,
Phill