NAPWA Blog

The National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA) has elected new officers:  Michelle Lopez is the new Chair of the Board of Trustees; Darryl Wong, MPH is Vice Chair and Alberto Santana is Secretary.  Additionally, two new At-Large members were added to the Board’s Executive Committee: Dr. David Holtgrave and John McGuirk.  First, meet the new officers:

Michelle Lopez is a person living with HIV and Treatment Educator/Administrator at the Community Healthcare Network of New York City.

Darryl Wong, MPH is a person living with HIV and Deputy Director of the New York HIV Planning Council at the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene.

Alberto M. Santana, MS, is Public Health Account Manager for Orasure Technologies and currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. 

David Holtgrave, PhD is Professor and Department Chair at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

John McGuirk is a person living with HIV and Regional HIV Specialist at Walgreen’s Pharmacy, as well as Chair-Elect of the Miami-Dade HIV/AIDS Partnership.

The new board officers  join Errol Chin-Loy, Board Treasurer and a person living with HIV from New York City and Judith Billings, a person living with HIV, past Board Chair and a private consultant in Tacoma, Washington.

“We welcome these new officers and the breadth of experience they bring to NAPWA’s Executive Committee,” said Chair Lopez. 

But NAPWA needs your help too.  The Board is looking for broader community participation on its Development and Membership Committee as well as its Program and Policy Committee.  These committees are open to participation from community members who are not members of NAPWA’s Board of Trustees.  They are central to NAPWA’s mission and we truly encourage community members become involved.  To express your interest in serving on these committees, please contact NAPWA’s Director of Operations, Joseph Stankavage at JStankavage@napwa.org.

NAPWA President and CEO, Frank Oldham, Jr. is speaking out for more services targeting black gay men in an interview with City Limits Weekly:

Frank J. Oldham, Jr., who has been HIV-positive for over 20 years, is still haunted by memories of the early 1980s when an unidentified, lethal plague wracked lower Manhattan. “AIDS was like a holocaust for the gay community in Chelsea and Greenwich Village,” Oldham recalls. “There’s a generation of us who saw friends and lovers dying all around us. We were going to memorial services daily.”Since then, Oldham has dedicated much of his time to keeping the spotlight on HIV/AIDS. He served as head of the city’s Office of AIDS Policy Coordination in 2003 (whose functions have since been rolled into the city health department), and now leads the National Association of People with AIDS as president and CEO. “We can’t pretend as though it’s no longer fatal. The epidemic is still destructive and spreading so rapidly,” says Oldham, a Brooklyn native. “Given the statistics about who is most at risk, we definitely need more black gay male organizations doing intervention work.”

Read the full story here.