New Global Coalition of Advocates To Focus on Women, Girls, and HIV
ONAP Announces Federal Interagency Members Developing National HIV/AIDS Strategy
HUD Studies Anti-gay and Gender-based Discrimination
New Global Coalition of Advocates To Focus on Women, Girls, and HIV
Women ARISE, the largest coalition of women’s organizations that have ever come together around HIV/AIDS, will be launched at a meeting at the United Nations on March 4.
Women leaders from diverse networks and groups in every region of the world created Women ARISE to counter the continued lack of action in five key areas that impact women and girls living with and affected by HIV—Access, Rights, Investment, Security, and Equity.
As a new and powerful coalition, Women ARISE is committed to focusing attention on the serious problems that women and girls, in all their diversity, face in regard to HIV/AIDS.
ONAP Announces Federal Interagency Members Developing National HIV/AIDS Strategy
Although the United States has one of the worst HIV epidemics among industrialized nations, the U.S. has never adopted a coordinated nationwide response to address the epidemic. President Obama is committed to addressing HIV in the United States and has tasked the White House Office of National AIDS Policy (ONAP), under the direction of Jeffrey Crowley, to develop a National HIV/AIDS Strategy. The President articulated three goals for the strategy:
- 1. Reduce the number of new HIV infections (HIV incidence)
2. Increase access to care for people living with HIV and optimize health outcomes
3. Reduce HIV-related disparities
The strategy will not be a comprehensive catalog of all of the things necessary to respond to the HIV epidemic, but rather, an opportunity to identify a number of steps that can shift and improve the nation’s response to HIV/AIDS and achieve the President’s goals.
In order to develop the strategy, feedback from community partners across the country was gathered from last August through December. In the second phase of developing the strategy, the formation of a federal interagency working group was achieved at the beginning of this year. The group includes influential leaders from departments and agencies across the U.S. government, and includes subcommittees devoted to each of the President’s three goals for the strategy.
One thing that has become abundantly clear is that tackling HIV and AIDS requires more than just a medical response. That is why the interagency working group also includes members from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, the Social Security Administration, and other government entities. Moreover, ONAP is consulting with key officials at other departments and agencies that could not formally participate on existing interagency committees to address gaps on topics critical to the development of a successful National HIV/AIDS Strategy.
A meeting of the interagency members took place on February 24 in Washington, D.C., designed to give the public an opportunity to hear what has already taken place and the next steps in developing the strategy. Notes from this meeting are available at www.aids.gov.
HUD Studies Anti-gay and Gender-based Discrimination
According to a report by Karen Hawkins in The Washington Post, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has started soliciting input from residents of Chicago, New York, and San Francisco (cities with large gay populations) on how a study of discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity should be conducted. A listening session was held in Chicago at City Hall on February 25.
When federal officials studied housing discrimination based on race, it was easy to send in testers of different racial backgrounds and gauge how landlords and real estate agents treated people of color compared with whites. But now they are faced with the question of how to design a study that would make an applicant’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity as obvious as race or color.
Researchers plan to get "creative" in designing the study, and they hope the input and stories from meetings in the three cities will help. Officials are working on a way to let people elsewhere weigh in through e-mail or Web-based seminars.
According to the report, “Bias complaints and lawsuits nationwide make clear that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people face housing discrimination, from being turned down for apartments to being steered away from certain neighborhoods, but no one has tried to track how common such bias is.”
Advocates hope HUD's effort to gather data could be a first step toward obtaining legal protections.
"It finally will give us hard data to back up the heartbreaking stories of discrimination we've been hearing for years," said Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "This HUD study will show that there is a class of people ... who have been repeatedly shut out of that portion of the American dream."
Bill Greaves, Chicago's liaison to the gay community, made the point that there are other kinds of discriminatory behavior besides denying people access to housing.
"I think people are going to say that the discrimination in the rental and sale of housing is less a problem than the harassment and discrimination people experience after they've moved into their new home," Greaves said. He described a case in which Chicago awarded $12,000 in damages to a gay man after his landlord outed him to his family, called him derogatory names, and threatened to evict him.
