Safe Haven gets funding boost for HIV education, outreach
Iya Dammons was only a child when her aunt contracted HIV — the virus that causes AIDS and killed more than 12,000 Marylanders between 1981 and 2000. She still remembers how her family members and neighbors treated her.
“Watching people tell her, ‘No, you can’t come to my house,’” Dammons remembered, her voice thick with emotion. “I watched her sell her soul on the block, then die. Nobody cared about my aunt. She went away in a box.”
HIV is no longer the death sentence it was three decades ago — a message that Dammons now spreads as the executive director of Baltimore Safe Haven, an organization she founded in 2018 to support members of the city’s queer and trans community living in what she describes as “survival mode.”
Since Dammons started Baltimore Safe Haven, the organization has grown to provide transitional housing and other forms of homelessness prevention. Staff members and volunteers provide HIV testing and run a clinic where doctors can prescribe pre-exposure prophylaxis — a medication better known as PrEP, which is highly effective at preventing people from becoming infected with HIV through sex or injection drug use.
Recently, Safe Haven’s HIV outreach and education efforts got a funding boost from Gilead, the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical giant behind PrEP brands Descovy and Truvada. Over the next three years, Safe Haven will receive $1 million from the company, Dammons said.
The funding is part of Gilead’s Setting the PACE initiative, which is distributing $12.6 million to 19 organizations around the country that are working
to improve HIV prevention, education and anti-stigma efforts for Black women and girls.
Even though Black women comprise only about 14% of women living in the United States, in 2021, they accounted for more than half of new HIV diagnoses among women ages 16 and above. And while data is sparse on trans people living with HIV, existing studies suggest that Black trans women represent about 52% of trans women who are diagnosed with the virus.
Generations of racism, social and economic marginalization, and residential segregation have built steep barriers for Black women to access HIV testing and antiretroviral therapy — a kind of medication that reduces the amount of HIV in a person’s body and helps them stay healthy. People who stay on track with their treatment are able to reduce their viral load so much that it is undetectable, and are able to have sex without transmitting HIV.
Black trans women face even more challenges when navigating the U.S. health care system, which is poorly equipped to meet their needs. According to a report by Center for American Progess, a left-leaning public policy organization, 68% of trans people of color have experienced discrimination or mistreatment from a health care provider.
Members of this population are more likely to be discriminated against in employment and participate in survival sex work, which puts them at greater risk for contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Black trans people also are at high risk of living in temporary or unstable housing, being without health coverage and experiencing sexual violence.
Then, there’s stigma — something that has a mighty power to make people with HIV avoid seeking treatment, said Dr. Oluwaseun Falade-Nwulia, an associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
While public understanding and knowledge about HIV has improved since Dammons’ aunt became an outcast following her diagnosis, living with the virus still can be a lonely and isolating experience. For that reason, it’s important to provide testing and education where people already feel comfortable, Falade-Nwulia said.
When resources are provided by a trusted community organization, people living with HIV are more likely to feel like they’re being treated as people, rather than diseases. Peer support from people with similar life experiences also is important in keeping people on track with their care.
“Human beings need other human beings to support them,” FaladeNwulia
said.
Dammons, a Black trans women who has been incarcerated and engaged in survival sex work, knows this all too well. She’s been on PrEP for about two years, and is committed to spreading knowledge about the medication to others in her community.
Volunteers and staff members from Safe Haven speak at local schools about HIV and provide community and support for young adults living with the virus. They also venture into more untraditional spaces — some nights, they set up shop at a nightclub to spread the word about the importance of testing and share resources.
“We bounce around the club, inside of bathrooms, where they’re doing consumption of drugs,” Dammons said. “Stopping in, giving them condoms, giving them flyers, putting them in their back pockets.”
“They started to come to us because they saw us in familiar spaces — where they were,” she continued. “And we became somebody they trusted by doing that.”