STAFF WILL BE PRESENTING AT SIX WORKSHOPS

This year, A&PI Wellness Center staff will be presenting workshops at two prestigious national conferences. The first conference is the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA) in Washington DC at the end of October. The second conference is the United States Conference on AIDS (USCA) in Chicago in November.

Sapna Mysoor, Banyan Tree Project program manager, will be presenting best practices and lessons learned from our social marketing and social networking campaigns at APHA. The session, 4093.0 Deconstructing Difference and Disrupting Discrimination: Social Etiologies and Opportunities for Change, features other presenters talking about alcohol use, stigma, hepatitis B, and gender differences. Sapna will concentrate on how the campaign is used to address HIV/AIDS stigma among A&PIs.

Staff will be presenting at five different sessions this year in Chicago at USCA. On Day 1 of USCA, A&PI Wellness Center, in collaboration with Asian Pacific Islander American Health Forum, will again host the day-long A&PI Institute featuring discussions about how recent policy changes in HIV prevention at national and local levels affect our communities Day 2 finds the bulk of our presentations. Mike Nguyen and Clay Ngo will lead off with Digital GaGa (Gay Asians Gearing towards Advocacy): Sexy Role Model Stories and Interventions in the Tech Age. The workshop explores how to create culturally sensitive and relevant youth programming online by adapting the popular Community Promise intervention for an internet audience using a series of digital shorts called [UN]SPOKEN SHORTS.

Down the hall, Saurabh Bajaj, Director of Development will be hosting a roundtable called Throwing Good Money after Good: Making the Case for Investing in Development. Attendees will learn new fundraising strategies, map out the needs of their agencies, practice strategies to make the case for investing in development, and take home concrete steps to their respective organizations.

Developing and Fostering HIV Prevention Leadership Pipelines for Queer Youth of Color will be presented by Ben Cabangun and Mike Nguyen on Friday at 4:30. This workshop will help attendees develop a Youth Leadership Academy. The Academy serves as a pipeline to spawn and nurture young community leaders by allowing them to critically contribute in the planning, development, and implementation of health education teaching and research in urban settings.

The last session, presented by Saurabh and executive director Lance Toma, is called Crisis Communication: What to do when Disaster Strikes. This workshop will explore the most effective communication tools and strategies to use in crisis situations. Lance and Saurabh will outline the components of a strong crisis communications strategy, and identify common pitfalls and hurdles when navigating a crisis. This workshop is on Saturday.

CHECK OUT THE PRESENTATIONS!