Our movement is guided by the following principles:
Social Justice
Aim to remove barriers, eliminate oppressive systems, and provide opportunities and freedoms so that people from all communities – including Black, Latino, and LGBTQ communities – can thrive and achieve optimal health and wellness.
Equity
Focus on strategies that will create access to resources and services for all people, eliminate inequities, and increase people’s capacity to make decisions that affect themselves, their families, and their communities. Focus especially on those communities that face the biggest barriers affecting their access and ability to focus on HIV prevention, treatment, and care services.
Integration
Create an integrated system of HIV prevention, treatment, care, and advocacy across the state. Allow space for ideas and innovation to emerge and for each part of the system to function individually and collectively to their greatest capacity. Build bridges to connect people, groups, organizations, and systems in order to share data, resources, knowledge, funding, and support.
Empowerment
Support shared decision-making between people affected by HIV and providers and across systems. Recognize that people are experts in their own lives. Provide people with the skills, tools, and health literacy needed to navigate their health and wellbeing. Build capacity in the people and organizations working in the field so that they can be leaders and role models for the communities they serve.
Advocacy
Promote and implement policies that will support the work in all areas of the plan. We need supportive policies at the federal, state, local, and organizational levels. In addition to policy work by people who work within health and legislative systems, there is a role for advocates and grassroots efforts outside of these established systems.
Community
Lasting change happens at the local level among people who are working together, without a partisan frame, to create a healthy community. To create movement around this plan, start by strengthening existing relationships among people and organizations and reaching out to new ones. Listen and learn from multiple perspectives and build bridges with non-traditional partners and with people who have been left out of the conversation in the past. This creates opportunities to hear their stories and questions and to learn about what matters to them. Then, the work of this plan will reflect all people who are affected by HIV.