Presenting at Canada Pavilion AIDS2024
Date of Presentation: July 24, 2024
Presenters: Josephine P. Wong, Alan Li, Folasade Olaniyan and Pragya Mishra, and the ACE Team
Venue: Canada Pavilion, AIDS 2024; Munich, Germany
Audience: Global community of individuals working in the HIV/AIDS sector
On July 24, Dr. Josephine Wong (Co-PA), Dr. Alan Li (Co-PA), Folasade Olaniyan (CEM Research Coordinator), Pragya Mishra (Research Coordinator) of Project ACE presented at the 25th International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2024) in Munich, Germany, sharing insights on value-guided community action to reduce HIV stigma. This event was attended in person and virtually by the global community of individuals working in the HIV/AIDS sector. The conference is held annually to convene leading discoveries for HIV related health promotion and prevention work.
The presentation, entitled “Building Capacity and Mobilizing Value-Guided Community Action to Reduce HIV Stigma” showcased the impact of HIV stigma, HIV response implications, our Phase 1 findings, and highlighted the need for stigma reduction work in order to promote psychological flexibility and promote collective resilience and action. The Acceptance and Commitment to Empowerment (ACE) model was described as the framework for this work with a focus on value-guided community action.
HIV response implications suggest that our collective responses must address systemic intersectionalities which uniquely marginalize different communities, a need to de-silo HIV literacy and education, multi-level stigma reduction interventions, and meaningful engagement of living with and affected by HIV.
Participants gained insights into addressing community-specific factors to HIV stigma reduction work. One of the major takeaways was to drive long term change and have sustainable impact.
We have made the following resources available:
The materials shared above provide a comprehensive overview of the content presented during this conference and are valuable for those looking to deepen their knowledge on building community capacity and promoting community resilience.
The AIDS 2024 Conference was a notable achievement in knowledge transfer for our team. We await future opportunities to continue sharing our work as we progress through this project in hopes of advancing collective resilience and action.