Talk of the Town
Dixon Diallo and Crowley at Atlanta town hall
The White House officially kicked off its listening tour on creating a National HIV/AIDS strategy on Tuesday night, when more than 2,000 people from across the country attended an HIV/AIDS town hall at the 2009 Prevention Conference in Atlanta. Some 60 people spoke for one minute a piece, giving White House officials suggestions about transgender health, prison reform, rights of women, gay men, African-Americans and other pressing topics.
“A sustainable HIV work force requires a workforce under 30. We need new leadership, mentorship. I need this to happen before I die with no HIV strategy that includes me,” said one participant, an HIV-positive nurse. For more commentary check out this Prevention Justice blog post, and the conference’s twitter feed.
There are unofficial HIV/AIDS town halls taking place across the country—last week, White House Director of National AIDS Policy Crowley attended one in Washington, North Carolina and Rep. James Clyburn hosted one in Columbia, South Carolina. But Tuesday night’s meeting was the first of the White House’s official national HIV/AIDS Community Discussions. The town hall was moderated by SisterLove Executive Director Dazon Dixon Diallo, and attended by the full White House AIDS policy staff
Local or national?
Participants included young people living with AIDS, health care workers, and advocates. The chief criticism of the town hall was that after an hour of speeches by Atlanta experts about the pillars of the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, there was limited time to hear comments. In addition, although this was billed as the Atlanta town hall, because it was a national conference, Atlanta residents’ comments were overshadowed by national input.
“There were 200 reserved tickets from non-conference attendees, but many of those people came down from New York and D.C.,” said Housing Works National Field Organizer Larry Bryant. “ I don’t know that having those 200 extra tickets made as much of a difference as it could have. I think that’s something that they’ll look into for the next national conference.”
Still, Bryant said the event was a good start to an ongoing effort and the process for receiving testimony was remarkably efficient. Speakers used a worksheet created by the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance to organize their thoughts. These worksheets will be adapted by the White House Office of National AIDS Policy to use at other forums.
“This was not one of those belligerent town hall meetings—it was very productive,” said David Munar, AIDS Foundation of Chicago Vice President of Policy and Communications. “And the town hall participants weren’t the usual suspects.”
But activist spirit was in evidence. Before the town hall, a group of women held banners reading “Prioritize women, prioritize everyone,” showing the need not to lose focus on women’s role in the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
A new energy
This year’s Prevention conference was markedly different from two years ago. Advocates say that the new Administration brought new energy to the meeting, with officials from the CDC more willing to speak publicly about the need for structural interventions for prevention.
“I don’t know if I will say that we were all on the same page, but at least we were reading from the same book,” Dixon Diallo said. “It felt like the researchers and academians and the community people, that we are all in this struggle together.”
Top federal officials did not speak publicly in support of lifting the federal ban on syringe exchange funding. Although federal government studies have noted the effectiveness of syringe exchange, and Obama publicly supports ending the ban, the Administration has been loathe to get involved in the “culture wars.”
In her speech Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius didn’t talk about the need to lift the federal ban on syringe exchange funding. She did however, discuss groups marginalized by the epidemic.
There was a concerted effort at the conference to talk about men who have sex with men, (who, the CDC released, are more than 50 times as likely to be infected with HIV as women and straight men).
“In 2005, the CDC reported that in five major cities, almost half of all African-American gay men were HIV-positive, [and] the situation is also dire for Latinos,” Sebelius said. “Imagine if it were half the straight white women in Atlanta. Wouldn’t we be calling this a national emergency? Shouldn’t we be? That’s how we at HHS are treating it.”
Before Sebelius’s speech, a group of protesters from AIDS Foundation of Chicago, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project and SisterLove rallied on stage calling for health care reform. Sebelius applauded.
“It was more of a pep rally than a protest,” Bryant said.
Posted on August 28, 2009 at 12:37 am
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