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Chair's Challenge

Every year, NASTAD's Board Chair issues a challenge to our membership to move us forward in our mission to end the HIV and hepatitis epidemics.

Access, Engage, & Activate: Centering and Recentering Key Populations

NASTAD’s Board Chair, Dave Kern of Chicago, has issued a challenge to NASTAD and its membership to center key populations in our efforts to end the HIV and hepatitis epidemics.

Over the next year, the challenge calls on health department and NASTAD staff to focus on four key populations:

A Black trans woman smiles in her bedroom

Persons of Trans Experience

  • Engage trans communities by convening townhall-style meetings to listen, learn, and work with trans partners to create solutions
  • Continue to use gender-affirming language
  • Find opportunities to engage trans youth; pay them to be liaisons to their communities
  • Create safe mechanisms for input like digital suggestion boxes
  • Assess and make available to the trans community institutions that are trans-affirming
  • Fight within your organizations to do what’s right to affirm the well-being of trans people

Persons Who Use Drugs

  • Explore opportunities to advance comprehensive systems of care that provide harm reduction, including clean needles and syringes and naloxone, and also integrated medical and behavioral health care
  • Leverage flexible programs to provide prevention, care, and housing services
  • Review and begin readying for National HCV Elimination Plan implementation
A person opens an overdose prevention kit
A doctor speaks with an elderly patient

Persons Aging with HIV

  • Be forward-thinking about the systems of care and support individuals are going to need through the end of natural life
  • Ensure communities receive compassionate and appropriate care later in life, including aging at home, services in assisted living, skilled nursing care, and other long-term care facilities
  • Address the non-HIV clinical aspects of aging like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, mobility, and other geriatric conditions and psycho-social concerns including isolation and depression

Gay, Bisexual, and other Same Gender Loving Men

  • Approach engagement of services using a syndemic, whole-person framework
  • Accelerate reduction in HIV transmission in this population, particularly among Black and Latino men
  • On a national level, push for increases in PrEP funding and a national PrEP program
A queer Latinx person sits on a chair

*Photos from Building Healthy Online Communities’ collection