Young Black Men

After years of working with women, my attention has recently turned towards men. I came to Philadelphia with this wish but wasn't sure how it was going to materialize. Well... they found me. I was developing a TruthAIDS community-based partnership with a local HIV prevention project called PALMS when it happened. I strongly believe HIV prevention programs should run through or be partnered with community development organizations. PALMS operates with this model.

The PALMS acronym stands for the Prevention of AIDS through Live Movement and Sound and is a project run out of the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation. This project uses actors to perform role plays to at-risk youth as a method of delivering HIV prevention education. The actors are amazing and the community health educators are wonderfully charismatic but the program has recently gotten some of its funding cut. That's when I came along. After witnessing their work first hand, I was so impressed with the effect they had on the youth they were teaching and believed in the potential of this small community-based programs.

One of the frustrating realities about HIV prevention is that there are so many great programs that stay small. We need to find ways to help scale these existing projects up so they can begin to build a movement of change. I have been working with PALMS to see how a physician partnering up alongside an existing community-based program can begin to address this issue of scale-up. I have been recently incorporated into their interventions as an official collaborator, offering my knowledge as a physician during their interventions with the youth and helping out with testing and counseling if needed. I have also brought a film crew to tape them to see how media can serve to bolster the scale up efforts.

The partnership is working lovely and is serving as a stepping stone for how the different silos of HIV prevention can be brought together. Fortuitously, PALMS runs their interventions in single gender groups because of the tricky topics of love, sex, violence, and power that the role plays reflect. This has provided me with the chance to work with young black men. As I listen to their stories, I can't help but reflect on my own brother's who lives in Washington D.C. The violence in communities like Philadelphia and Washington D.C. leave a lot for a sister to worry about. The families are under attack.