Call for Session Proposals: SPEAK UP! A National Leadership Summit for Women Living with HIV

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naina khanna

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Apr 6, 2016, 9:02:47 AM4/6/16

Apologies for duplicates...

Greetings, all!

Positive Women’s Network – USA (PWN-USA) is thrilled to announce our call for session proposals for SPEAK UP! A National Leadership Summit for Women Living with HIV 2016.

We invite proposals for various types of sessions (affinity groups, discussion group, or workshop) for SPEAK UP! Positive Women’s Network – USA’s 2016 NationalLeadership Summit.

SPEAK UP! A National Leadership Summit forWomen Living with HIV will be held September 27-30, 2016 in Fort Walton Beach, FL. This Summit is open only to women with HIV, including transgender women with HIV. Information about the Summit is available at: www.pwn-usa.org/2016-summit

In September 2014, PWN-USA held our first-ever National Leadership Summit to build advocacy skills and leadership capacity among over 200 women living with HIV from 26 states, the US Virgin Islands, Canada and Mexico. Participants from the 2014 Summit have gone on to do amazing work in their communities, fighting stigma, advocating for fair policies and supporting people living with HIV in their regions. The 2016 Summit will be designed for both first time participants and 2014 alumni as emerging and seasoned advocates to deepen advocacy and collective organizing strategies during a key election cycle.

You can read about the magic that happened at our 2014 Summit here

The theme for SPEAK UP! 2016 is: Organizing for Collective Power

We’re serious about building power. In this critical election year, we remain committed to our vision: a world where all people with HIV live free of stigma and discrimination. We work to achieve this by preparing and involving women living with HIV, in all our diversity, including gender identity and sexual expression, to be meaningfully involved at the tables where decisions are made about our lives, our communities, and our rights. We actively work at the intersections of race, class, gender, immigrant status, sexual orientation, and more.

If you are interested in contributing to this growing and vibrant community, we encourage you to submit an abstract to conduct a session (workshop or other activity at the Summit). As a session leader you will ensure that information and skill-building activities are provided in line with PWN-USA values, priorities, and goals for the Summit.

There will be 5 core tracks at the Summit:

1) Rights, Power and Justice

2) Building Leadership Skills

3) Policy and Advocacy

4) Media & Strategic Communications and

5) Advancing the HIV Research, Care, and Prevention Agenda

Final decisions on session proposals will be made with an eye towards meaningful involvement of women with HIV and communities of color as presenters. In particular, we seek strong representation of women living with HIV, people of color, trans and gender non-conforming individuals, and young people as presenters. We welcome abstract submissions from well-intentioned allies and encourage allies to submit in collaboration with women living with HIV.

Descriptions for session tracks are below:

Track	Track Description
1. Policy & Advocacy	Sessions in the Policy and Advocacy track will examine or discuss timely policy and/or advocacy trends relevant to women with HIV and provide participants with tools to take action at the local, state and/or federal level.
2. Effective Leadership Skills	Sessions in the Leadership Skills track will focus on developing specific skills that support leadership by women with HIV, including self-care for leaders.
3. Rights, Power & Justice	Sessions in the Rights, Power & Justice track will focus on building critical consciousness and/or ability to use a human rights/social justice framework in advocacy. We are especially interested in sessions that intentionally hold a power, race, gender and/or class analysis and which advance our collective ability to be accountable and strategic as a movement-building organization. Sessions in this track may focus on particular rights and justice issues that disproportionately impact communities most affected by HIV.
4. Media & Strategic Communications	Sessions in the Media and Strategic Communications track will focus on building media and communications capacity of participants to advocate, organize and/or mobilize on policy issues through effective print, online and/or broadcast media, and/or social media strategies.
5. Advancing the HIV Research, Care, and Prevention Agenda	Sessions in the Advancing HIV Research, Care, and Prevention Agenda track will focus on building our ability to advocate for innovative and timely research and service delivery that works for our communities

If you’re interested in submitting a session proposal, click here for more information and our online submission form, including guidelines for submissions, or please see the attached session proposal form in Word format. Proposals can be submitted using the online form OR by completing the attached Word document. The information in both is the the same.

All proposals are due by 11pm ET on Friday, April 29th, 2016.

If submitting as a Word document, please email your proposal to pwns...@gmail.com by the deadline.

We can't wait to see you in Fort Walton Beach!

Naina Khanna
executive director, Positive Women's Network - USA