Our March 2019 Shero of the Month is Loren Jones of Berkeley, California. Naina Khanna, PWN-USA Executive Director, who nominated Loren, said, “Loren is an outstanding and fierce advocate who has paved the way here in Oakland and nationally to advocate for the priorities of Black women living with HIV. I’m honored to have worked with and learned from her in many capacities over the years, including her role as a founding member of PWN-USA and most recently as a member of our Board of Directors.”
Loren remembers being at Women Organized to Respond to Life-Threatening Diseases (WORLD) at the time PWN-USA was founded. She said it was a natural extension for those women living with HIV who wanted to educate the country on political issues affecting all women. “The link between WORLD and PWN is so important. By the time you finish educating women on what HIV is, when you should look at treatment options and how it affects our bodies differently than men, so much time has passed. That’s why the spin off of PWN from WORLD was important and necessary. PWN was able to try and educate the country on the rest of the political issues.There has to be separation, and levels of interest in advocacy and education.”
When asked why she chose to commit to the mission, vision, and values of PWN-USA, Loren said, “I chose to move toward policy because it moved me out of that “all about me” phase. The policy and advocacy work requires group thought. Before that era, we weren’t talking about reproductive justice at all. We believed getting pregnant after an HIV diagnosis couldn’t be done safely.”
Loren’s advocacy centers the removal of misinformation, stigma, and stereotypes associated with HIV transmission in women. Loren said, “A lot of us thought for years that women could not get HIV because the focus was on other demographics. Black women contract HIV at rates higher than white women.”
Loren has lived with HIV for the past 33 years and has been a staunch advocate for women living with HIV to be included in HIV research. “The main push we needed was woman- specific research, because we definitely can have babies after diagnosis, even though our doctors told us different. The other thing that we needed to know was even when women went into treatment, were they not only getting the treatment that would save their lives, but also receiving treatment that was not toxic to the fetus.”
Loren continues to make sure aging with HIV is centered in discussions. “The science didn’t start out thinking we would be dealing with females. We also didn’t think we would be dealing with people 40 and up. People thought we would all be dead so they didn’t really do the science that needed to be done around around aging with HIV.”
Loren wants long-term survivors of HIV “to assert that we are not dead and will not be overlooked.” She doesn’t personally believe there is anything special about her as a human being that has kept her alive while other people have died.
Congratulations, Loren, and may we continue to advocate together in the future!