In this issue:
- Speak Up! 2018: A Celebration of #10YearsFierce
- Meet the PWN-USA Shero of the Month, Marnina Miller
- PWN-USA Welcomes Grissel Granados to the Board of Directors
- PWN-USA Inaugural Policy Fellows Graduate at Speak Up! 2018
- Join Us on Twitter for #ACAPositive Town Hall with Positively Trans
Speak Up! 2018: A Celebration of #10YearsFierce
Have you heard? Positive Women’s Network-USA just celebrated our 10 year anniversary! True to form, we honored ten years of fierce leadership by and for women living with HIV by convening nearly 350 women living with HIV in the US South for 3 ½ days of intense skills-building for advocacy, movement building, and policy. This great 5-minute video by Mark S. King will give you a flavor of what happened at SPEAK UP! this year.
#SPEAKUP18 officially kicked off on the evening of Thursday April 12th with moving tributes from indigenous women of trans experience from Hawaii and Arizona, honoring our ancestors and inviting us into the space. We co-created an altar and acknowledged the trajectory we have traveled as a community together over the past ten years, since PWN’s founding in 2008. Heard often throughout the Summit was the cry: #10YearsFierce!
Meet the PWN-USA Shero of the Month, Marnina Miller!
Our Shero of the Month is Marnina Miller of Houston, Texas. Tana Pradia, who nominated her, had this to say: “Greater Houston Area Chapter’s Marnina Miller has grown and blossomed within our chapter…We are so very proud to call her our SHERO in her journey living with HIV.”
Marnina, who holds several roles within the PWN-USA Texas chapter and is a PWN policy fellow this year, decided to come out publicly at Speak Up! 2018 as a woman living with HIV. Asked why she decided to do it and how she felt before and after doing it, she said: “I was tired of living with shame, and felt my community deserve more from me because my community loved me when I didn’t have the strength to love myself and poured so much into me. Still, I wondered how my family would feel and battled with the internalized stigma that I could face after going public with my status, but I felt like a ton of bricks had been lifted from my shoulders.“
Her plans for the future? “My short-term goal would be to show people I’m living in my truth to support others to live in theirs and to hopefully break down the stigma surrounding people living with HIV. Lastly, I hope to educate as many as I can beginning with my friends and family. My long-term goal would be to hopefully work in the field professionally and influence as well as create public policy that would positively impact people living with HIV.”
Know a potential PWN-USA Shero of the Month? Nominate them here!
PWN-USA Welcomes Grissel Granados to the Board of Directors
Positive Women’s Network-USA is thrilled to welcome Grissel Granados join our Board of Directors. Grissel is Program Manager for HIV Prevention Services at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She works primarily with young gay and bisexual men and transgender youth of color. Locally, she co-chairs the L.A. County Commission on HIV and was a community co-chair for the Los Angeles County HIV/AIDS Strategy. She served on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS for three years until she stepped down due to the non-responsive and oppressive administration.
Grissel is a Mexican immigrant and has been living with HIV since infancy. She co-directed and co-produced We’re Still Here, a documentary depicting the stories of the first generation of people born with HIV who are now adults. When she’s not doing HIV work Grissel enjoys spending time with her two cats and binge watching TV shows.
When asked why she decided to join the board and to share her vision for PWN, Grissel stated, “It is an honor to join the board of PWN because I truly believe this is the most intersectional HIV advocacy group there is. I am continuously inspired by the fierce work and passion of PWN members. During my time on PACHA, I benefited from the mentorship and support of PWN. Through my involvement on the board I hope to support more women getting involved in HIV advocacy across the country, in particular Latinx women. I would like advocates to have access to the important tools developed by PWN in Spanish and create spaces where people can participate fully in their language.”
Congratulations to PWN’s Year 1 Policy Fellows for Their Graduation!
In 2017, as part of our mission to prepare and involve women living with HIV in all levels of advocacy and decision making tables that impact their lives, we launched a yearlong federal policy training fellowship program for people who identify as women living with HIV. We’re thrilled to congratulate our first 12 PWN policy fellows for graduating on April 13, 2018, during the SPEAK UP! Summit.
These fellows participated in extensive policy advocacy trainings and completed a 3-month practicum where they worked with host organizations to apply what they learned. Fellows were supported by the PWN Policy Department and a team of Policy Coaches: Suraj Madoori from Treatment Action Group, Kathie Hiers from AIDS Alabama, Jessica Terlikowski formerly of AIDS Foundation of Chicago, and Kim Miller formerly of the HIV Medicine Association.
Check out what our amazing 2017-2018 PWN Policy Fellow graduates worked on:
Angela Hawkins (TX ) – interned at Family Justice Network and created a factsheet on paid family leave in Texas,
Chunnika Hodges (MI) – worked with Black Treatment AIDS Network (BTAN) – Detroit and developed a working group on sexual and reproductive health and rights of women in Michigan, particularly women living in rural areas,
Stacy Jennings (SC) – worked with the Women’s Rights Empowerment Network and wrote “To Bare or Not To Bare”, a reproductive justice-based family planning fact sheet for WLHIV,
Shyronn Jones (GA) – worked with the Georgia Coalition to End HIV Criminalization/Equality GA and organized a postcard project to get facts about HIV criminalization and stories of people living with HIV to GA legislators,
Kamaria Laffrey (FL) – worked with the Florida Community Health Worker Coalition and wrote a policy brief comparing Medicaid expansion in Florida to Medicaid expansion efforts in other Republican-led states,
Arianna Lint (FL) – worked at Arianna’s Center/Positively Trans to develop a needs assessment survey for trans women of color living with HIV in Florida,
Tiommi Luckett (AR) – worked with PWN-USA and created a best practices tool kit based on Affordable Care Act advocacy,
Katie Willingham (AL) – worked with Thrive Alabama to organize an advocacy day for a group of Alabama voters to meet with their state legislators.
Join PWN-USA and Positively Trans Monday, May 7, at 2pm EDT for an #ACAPositive Twitter Town Hall!
Transgender people living with HIV will be some of those most directly impacted by rollbacks to the Affordable Care Act, yet the community is rarely centered in the conversations around health care. That’s why PWN-USA is proud to partner with Positively Trans, a project of Transgender Law Center, for a special #ACAPositive Twitter town hall Monday, May 7, at 2pm EDT/1pm CDT/12pm MDT/11am PDT.
Please join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtags #ACAPositive and #PositivelyTrans! We will be tweeting from @uspwn.
Positive Women’s Network – USA is a national membership body of women living with HIV and our allies that exists to strengthen the strategic power of all women living with HIV in the United States. Founded in 2008 by 28 diverse HIV-positive women leaders, PWN-USA develops a leadership pipeline and policy agenda that applies a gender lens to the domestic HIV epidemic grounded in social justice and human rights.