Throughout the history of Mujeres Unidas Contra el SIDA (Mujeres), it has been our practice to take many risks and learn from new experiences. One such experience has been our participation with CHAMP as Prevention Justice Partners. It was a unique experience for Mujeres in coming together and getting past the intimidation of learning how to launch an advocacy campaign based on an issue that has personally affected San Antonio, especially our Latino community. Due to the high number of STIs among young Latinos, we decided that a worthwhile campaign issue would be to try and affect change in the current school policy that supports an abstinence-only sex education program. In an attempt to succeed with this campaign, the school district selected was one with the highest enrollment of Latino students and the one with the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STIs.

Mujeres is a small grass-roots organization with a mission to unify the Latino community by providing a safe environment for bilingual/bicultural support services and education to Latinas and their families living with or impacted by HIV/AIDS. The primary goals are to support and empower its members by utilizing a familia (family) approach to create a safe haven.

Our growth has been slow and deliberate as the women served by the organization have suffered injustices and prejudice in their lives and gaining trust can prove to be a lengthy process.

Such has been the case in taking part in advocacy work and in tackling community organizing when focusing on certain social justice issues. Stigma has played a role in the realistic fears that some of our members have personally experienced and in many instances has been the one factor that keeps us from doing more advocacy. However, Mujeres possess a strength that has often been the primary source of our success in confronting these fears. It is my belief that we are able to overcome obstacles because of the familia approach that we utilize in all the work that we do. Such was the case when CHAMP came into our lives early last year as a new endeavor and challenge.

The first step was to form our core group for the partnership and to help the brave members that joined to "trust in the process." The group was comprised of eleven members (mostly women) ranging in age from 25 to 68. I recall the many questions they had to understand the purpose of this new project. But in the spirit of familia, they forged ahead.

During the first training session that CHAMP provided, our members shared their fears and anxieties about advocacy and the idea of launching a campaign. We worked hard, and I recall people commenting that this was "too different" than the work we had been doing. Some participants doubted their ability to contribute to the work because they felt that they were "too dumb" or "too old." Spanish is the first and primary language of our youngest member and he required a translator. Due to the language barrier, he was initially hesitant to participate. There were two college students interning at Mujeres who joined the core group, but they seemed a bit reluctant to share their ideas. When the group learned about shared power and how my role as Executive Director was, therefore, different in our advocacy work and the decision-making it required, they displayed some resistance.

By the second time we met with our great CHAMP trainer and consultant, James Learned, the core group began to let their guard down, and it was through his excellent manner of "gently" challenging the group to step up to the plate that made us move to the next level. The group became more vocal, and everyone began to take more risks and learn about choosing an advocacy campaign issue. The process of choosing our issue was one that we would all learn from. One of the biggest lessons we learned was how to make group decisions utilizing the "consensus minus one" approach. To this day, we use this method to make group decisions. Such was the case in choosing a name for the group - Project RAGE (Raise Awareness-Get Educated). Our level of excitement grew with the assistance of CHAMP's graphic guru Lei Chou, who helped to create our Project RAGE logo.

Meetings took place every other week, and leadership responsibilities were shared. One of the student interns who had taken a passive role at the beginning of the year accepted the challenge to become Co-Coordinator of the group - and she excelled in this capacity. She helped set the agenda for our meetings, participated in weekly conference calls with CHAMP, and pushed our members to achieve our goals. We identified potential allies and partners that would endorse our campaign to promote a change from abstinence-only to a comprehensive sex education program in the school district we had decided to focus on, an ambitious goal in any city in the state of Texas. We could have chosen many other topics that adversely affect the Latino community, but the core group decided that this was an issue that encompasses what Mujeres stands for -unifying the Latino community and raising awareness.

We were and still are keenly aware that this is a challenge due to the provincial town that we live in. Despite this, the group did its research, contacted experts in the field to present at the Town Hall meeting we organized in March, conducted outreach in the neighborhood near the community center where the public meeting would take place, and prepared packets of information to disseminate.

By this time, the group was feeling ready to go out and talk with people about the work we were doing. I recall that one of the older members took on the challenge to flyer in front of a school and talk to parents about the need for their children to learn the facts about STDs. She later shared that she wished someone had reached out to her in such a way when she was younger; she may have been able to speak candidly with her son about protection and perhaps he may not have contracted HIV. We had a woman join the group late who took the lead in preparing for the Town Hall meeting. She also agreed to be one of the panelists, along with her 15-year-old daughter, both of whom are HIV positive. Before the big day, her older daughter agreed to sit on the panel to share her perspective of having three members of her family live with HIV, her parents and her sister.

We geared up for the big day by creating our fact sheet, ordering materials, purchasing T-shirts, lining up our speakers, and soliciting other agencies to have tables of information. The location we chose for the Town Hall meeting was right across the street from the high school we flyered. To the disappointment of our group, only 30 people attended. However, everyone there learned from each other. And there were four very vocal youth in attendance who asked many questions and made many profound comments. So much so, in fact, that we decided that the next phase of Project RAGE needed to have Youth Leaders.

Since then, Mujeres has submitted a letter of inquiry to the Third Wave Foundation to have Project Herminitas (Little Sisters) continue the work of Project RAGE. We have been invited to submit a full proposal, and a site visit was scheduled for early April. If funded, a Youth Peer Leader will be hired to enter the second phase of this work. Another exciting accomplishment is that an abstract has been accepted to be presented at the Women and HIV Clinical Conference in Dallas. The abstract is entitled: "Mujeres Unidas Contra el SIDA: From Support Group to Advocacy." Three members of the core group will go to the conference to present what they learned through their participation in the Prevention Justice Partnership.

This is what some of the core group members had to say about their involvement in Project RAGE and our Prevention Justice Partnership with CHAMP. One woman said: "I learned about the commitment you have to have to see a campaign through." Another said: "I learned what our groups can accomplish and how we can convey a message." Lastly, another woman who is a mother with teens attending middle school and high school said: "It was such an eye opening experience to see the lack of parental involvement when it comes to making decisions about what and how our children learn when it comes to sex."

I continue to be awestruck watching the growth of this group and feel both blessed and fortunate to have had our small grass-roots organization participate in such a rewarding experience.


Other articles in this issue:

• Confronting Overlapping Epidemics: HIV and Mass Imprisonment
• Mujeres and CHAMP's Prevention Justice Partnership: Another Lesson Learned
• HIV Prevention Research Advocacy Takes Off
• Same War, Different Battle