Happy New Year-Envisioning 2010
January 4th, 2010

Happy New Year! At Asian & Pacific Islander Wellness Center, we’re making plans for 2010 as we say goodbye to 2009. 2009 was a long year filled with excitement and stress, victories and defeats, and above all hope and change. I am especially proud of A&PI Wellness Center for its resilience and strength throughout 2009 as we continued to make a difference in the lives of our clients and for our communities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the state of California and across the US. I am deeply grateful for the support of our donors and supporters. It is because of all of you that we were able to make such a huge difference this past year.

For A&PI Wellness Center, 2009 was a year of amplifying the voices of our clients who clearly and powerfully articulated their truths and the reality of their lives with respect to national health care reform and the development of a national HIV/AIDS strategy. Our clients’ lives are at stake—their physical, emotional, spiritual and economic health, and their ability to live out their lives fully without fear, discrimination and stigmatization.

We have made a difference.

We were there for Adam, a 23 year-old Chinese American young man, when he tested HIV-positive earlier this year. We stood alongside our clients in Sacramento in June as we protested the budget cuts the Governor was making to HIV/AIDS programs and services across the state. We had a clear and integrated strategy of client, staff and community leadership voices at the National AIDS Strategy Town Halls, in Atlanta, San Francisco and Berkeley.

We will continue to make a difference.

As we plan for 2010 and beyond, we are seeing our comprehensive array of HIV/AIDS programs and services unravel due to the financial divestment of local and state governments. Concurrently, we will be grappling with the ongoing medicalization of HIV, the meaning and implications of HIV vaccine research results, pre-exposure prophylaxis possibilities and test and treatment models. The landscape will no longer be the same moving forward. Whatever twists and turns this uncharted terrain brings, A&PI Wellness Center will be fighting for, and on behalf of, our communities. Our comprehensive health is a right that must be protected at all costs.

As the new landscape for HIV/AIDS services emerges, A&PI Wellness Center will be there to ensure that our communities are front and center—for all of our transgender brothers and sisters, our immigrant and refugee sons and daughters, our Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities, and our friends and allies across all communities of color.

Wishing you hope and joy in the 2010.

Lance Toma, LCSW
Executive Director