Trauma in African American women’s lives. Just by being a survivor puts me at high risk. We don’t talk about most of the things that put us at risk for HIV.

What is secrecy and why the secret? We were told you don’t share your information with other people, so we don’t discuss that.

Shame, stigma and some level of guilt.

With co-morbidities don’t forget about young people, young women whose numbers of STDs are significantly higher than other races. Why are young women not getting screened and treated for different sexually transmitted infections?

Younger women playing out sexual experiences. We talk about a lot of reasons why we have sex. How do you decide who you’re going to have sex with or how to select a partner. And in today’s society you need a skill set different from older generations. We have incarcerated men, drug use men, etc. How are we preparing today’s women with these issues?

Money is given to health departments, and they’re supposed to see about those funds. They have nurses and then nurses cannot leave the building. The rates of HIV go up in those communities and they say well we have money in those places. But we cannot go out into the community. There needs to be something written into the Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to mandate them to work with CBOs. After 10 years of work with my local health department, a woman finally came in and did screening. In 1 month, she tested 45 people and of the 45, 25 were infected with an STD and they could have been out infecting others.

One of the barriers is we keep funding the same people who do lousy jobs. There are some health departments that don’t do it good and aren’t partnering. Is that really the best way to get money to the people?

So now we’ve got the testing. Who’s paying the bill for the medicine? We need health care for these disenfranchised folks. Who is going to pay the bills?

There’s not many youth at the table. There’s a huge separation between the seasoned workers and the younger ones coming into the fold. There should be youth liaisons because young black women connect better with other young black women.

Health departments differ in what they can do and what they are responsible for, and it pays for the CBOs to know who is doing what and we can only do so much. We have asked the states to have an African American AIDS physician in the state. We would like to do the job, but we get pieces of people who are there but no support from the state.

Our media has a lot of impact on what is seen when it comes to African Americans. We have the power to sanction the media and control what they send out. We need to do something about that. We’re not going to progress as long as we’re constantly in battle with the media.

When we were working with young people we want people to wait before having sex and they were listening. But that’s when we had sex education in school. But we changed streams.

We all have our own values, views, etc. We’re all over the continuum of knowledge.

The men here come from a different paradigm. We need to acknowledge why we need men to talk from their roles and their perspectives.

The human papillomavirus (HPV) message came out that got a lot of response. How can we take a fresh approached to those messages and couple them with HIV and herpes?

We have conferences for African American women that never get recognized and they applaud themselves for media hits, but it’s not the media hits that should be applauded but the people in those programs who are generating that interest.