"New Leaf, New Challenges"
EAST COAST CONFERENCE ON AIDS IN ASIAN & PACIFIC ISLANDER COMMUNITIES, September 17-18, 1999, New York, NY
More than 165 people attended the East Coast Conference on AIDS in Asian & Pacific Islander Communities, ""New Leaf, New Challenges," on September 17, 1999 at the Southgate Hotel in Manhattan. Despite Hurricane Floyd, most of our regional partners outside of New York were able to make it in to represent organizations such as Massachusetts Asian AIDS Prevention Project, AIDS Services in Asian Communities (Philadelphia), Indochinese Community Center (Falls Church, Virginia), and Asian & Pacific Islander Partnership for Health (Washington, D.C.).
The conference started with a welcome by Therese Rodriguez, executive director of the Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA, the conference host), in which she chronicled the history of exclusion of Asians throughout American history, and drew links between this history and the current invisibility of Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) in AIDS work.
Errol Chin-Loy, Citywide Coordinator of AIDS Policy for New York City, gave the keynote address. His address focused on the need for API communities to mobilize to ensure that the community’s HIV-related needs are met. He particularly emphasized the importance of the Ryan White CARE Act as funding a wide range of essential AIDS services; the Ryan White CARE Act will be up for re-authorization in 2000, and Mr. Chin-Loy emphasized the strategic importance of ensuring that the act is re-authorized, especially as many other groups are mobilizing to try to prevent its re-authorization.
The keynote address was followed by regional reports from a panel of presenters representing New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington D.C./Northern Virgina. Each presenter discussed the range of needs and services available in the area, and the remaining gaps that still need to be filled. Each presenter emphasized that the need for services still far outruns the resources available to provide them. The panel was concluded by a research update given by Dr. Francisco Sy, editor of the journal AIDS Education and Prevention, in which he reported on research activity on APIs and HIV in Atlanta, Philadelphia and New York.
The morning session concluded with a "response" from Miguelina Maldonado, director of government relations and public policy for the National Minority AIDS Council (NMAC). Ms. Maldonado encouraged us to use our regional collective strength to advocate for our communities. She also emphasized that we need to think beyond the numbers as we document the HIV-related needs of our communities.
During lunch, two brief reports were given, one by Glenn Magpantay of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) on the importance of Census 2000, and one by Moses Pounds from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) on client-level data collected through HRSA programs.
The afternoon consisted of breakout sessions on HIV prevention, client services, medical and complementary therapies, HIV and religious communities, and policy advocacy.
After the breakout sessions, we heard brief reports from each session. This was followed by insightful closing remarks from Steve Lew, a long-time AIDS activist and member of the President’s Advisory Council on AIDS and development director for the Support Center for Nonprofit Management. Mr. Lew emphasized the need for us to remember that AIDS is something that we can prevent from becoming a major epidemic in our communities, as it has in other communities.
On the following day, about fifty of the conference participants met to process the information from the preceding day, discuss the state of the policy environment, and begin to construct an East Coast API HIV/AIDS Policy Agenda. The group articulated East Coast-specific needs while keeping in mind the need to coordinate with related policy work led by national and West Coast API organizations. The meeting ended with the formation of an East Coast API HIV Policy Work Group, a smaller group that will refine the policy agenda, create a plan for its dissemination, and ensure that the work of building a stronger voice and improving services for our communities continues.
For more information, please contact John Chin, Asian & Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS (APICHA) at
212/620-7287 or e-mail, jchin@apicha.org.
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