Herstory

The U.S. Positive Women’s Network (PWN) was founded by 28 diverse HIV-positive women leaders in June 2008. PWN’s founding members are diverse in background and experiences -  rural, southern, and urban, of diverse races and ethnicities, and spanning a spectrium of ages, with the youngest 21 and the oldest 72 years old. Founding members included women born outside the U.S., monolingual Spanish speakers, and transgender women. Founding members’ common thread: they were all HIV-positive and had a deep desire to create a unified voice and build collective power for HIV-positive women across the United States.

Since our founding, PWN continues to develop a leadership pipeline and policy agenda that applies a gender lens to the domestic epidemic grounded in social justice and human rights. PWN’s focus on leadership development of HIV-positive women has included trainings on advocacy skills, media and communications, and using a human rights framework for advocacy. PWN’s policy agenda leads the nation in gender-sensitive HIV advocacy that comprehensively addresses the needs of women living with and vulnerable to HIV.

PWN is a project of WORLD (Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Disease), an Oakland, California-based organization that has been serving HIV-positive women since 1991. WORLD is an organization by, for and about HIV-positive women.