4/24/2025
Meeting the Moment brought together community voices, healthcare professionals, and advocates for a day of learning, storytelling, and collaboration. The morning opened with a powerful workshop led by Charlotte Purvis, designed to equip those with lived experience to craft and share their personal journeys.
During lunch, attendees were moved by Charlotte’s own story and her deep commitment to uplifting community voices. Miguel Miranda of ViiV Healthcare provided critical updates on their latest PrEP injection and engaged the audience in a thoughtful Q&A. Bishop Roger E. Billingsley-Hayes spoke passionately on the significance of the 340B program, urging attendees to advocate for its future (more info on how you advocate can be found here).
The day concluded with a collaborative workshop led by our Executive Director, where participants engaged in honest, solutions-driven conversations about local healthcare challenges and opportunities for change.
Thank you to all who attended, ViiV Healthcare for providing lunch, our partners, staff, board members, and especially those with lived experience who were able to join us!
Last week PWA hosted a workshop for people with lived experience. The purpose of the session was three-fold: 1) to help define your personal message, 2) to practice speaking in public, and 3) to use those skills in action directly following the workshop. The small group of PWA Ambassadors that participated took away a number of key thoughts such as “Knowing yourself is as important as knowing your audience.”; “Don’t tell the whole story.”; and “Slow down and use pauses to allow the audience to follow along.” No one likes public speaking but it has become an essential skill to learn that helps an individual advocate for themselves and others.
I would like to take a page from last week’s session and focus on the importance of knowing ourselves. Spring is the perfect time to take a moment and think about who we are. And as an important reminder, we are more than the sum of the “facts” that define us. For example, if you have a medical diagnosis that does not define who you are, but is one component in the complex picture that is you. Similarly, if you have made a mistake or done something hurtful that does not define who you are, but is a moment to rethink how you want to behave. And if you win the lottery, you are not suddenly a different person, but you may have the freedom to make different decisions or take different action. I am reminded of a set of questions that are frequently cycled through on the internet related to compatibility, successful first dates and long-lasting relationships. These questions are only useful in a relationship if you already know your own answer, translated as you need to know yourself.
Knowing yourself is not always easy. It takes honestly analyzing your thoughts, actions and feelings. It requires thinking about congruence – do your thoughts match your actions? And it will get more complicated when you add in your feelings. The library, bookstore and internet are filled with self-help resources that all basically come down to knowing ourselves and taking some kind of action for change. And you can go much further back to the historical roots of self-analysis that is inherent in all of the major religions. The messages urging us to know ourselves are all around us but how much time do we actually allocate to this important task?
Given that we know and understand the difficulty of the task, I urge you to take concrete actions to help you think about ‘who you are’. A few ideas to think about are:
Write in a journal or keep a gratitude journal daily
Consider joining a support group
Participate in religious groups that discuss scriptures or religious writing
Join a Book Club
Ask a person you trust to define three of your strengths and three of your weaknesses
Look deeply into when your thoughts, feelings and actions are incongruent
Spring is a wonderful time to think about ‘who you are’ and if you do not like all that you discover on this journey of self-awareness, always remember that you can hit the re-set button on your life and make a change. It may help to define a particular area you want to focus on – work, relationships, or health behaviors such as nutrition, exercise, sleep or substance use. If you find you are “hiding” something from others or you are saying one thing and feeling another, this may be a particular area you want to think about. “Cleaning” our mental and emotional house is as important as our physical house – take the month of May to focus on yourself and hit the re-set button on harmful or negative self-talk!
Our next meeting for Region 3 will be on May 13th at 10:00 A.M.
In these meetings we take space for those to highlight work, accomplishments, and prove that those who are HIV+ thrive and are successful. As long as you're willing to help move the needle forward, by any action small or large, we genuinely want you to join us.
This year we're focused on mapping services that clients can access in our eight county region. We know that the work you currently, do, and might even begin to do is so critical to this effort. Even if you might not join us, we encourage to forward this invite to anyone who might be interested. After all, we're all in this together.
Can we count on you to join us? If so, click the button below for more information on how to do so.
We can't wait to see you there.
Take a moment and imagine what we’d ask ourselves after receiving devastating health news. Will our health insurance cover this (if you have it)? Do we have a way to consistently get to our appointments? Do we have a safe place to live? Can we keep our homes if we miss work due to this? Will my friends and family be there for me?
For those we help, unfortunately those questions are met with extreme uncertainty. For this reason, PWA urges you to consider making a planned monthly donation to PWA. For as little as $30 a month, you can help heat a home in the winter and have A/C in the summer. For $50 a month you help children get a healthy breakfast each day. For $100 a month, you can help provide a housing deposit that allows a single parent to move into an apartment.
In today’s challenging times, let’s come together to make sure that we can help as many as possible.