I founded an organzition in the U.S. called AIDS Relief Fund for China. I brought resources and ideas to China to help combat HIV/AIDS. Recently with a team of partners, I created a project called the Quality Rapid Testing to provide 100% community-based HIV and syphilis rapid testing service to gay men in 24 cities. While the government is drafting guidelines to restrict community groups operating rapid testing, we are demonstrating CBO's ability, with very good outcomes, in providing possible solutions.
Empowerment. I would like to see community based organizations in China have a say in their work. The Chinese government and most funding agencies often dictate the agenda and turn most CBOs into assembly line workers. People lose visions and drive. HIV work becomes a number game for epidemiology, all about statistics, not human lives.
When I visit CBOs in China, I know the people want more, but they lack ideas, resouces, and trust. My dream is to build a team of fighters to stand together to take charge of the future of gay communities' social psycho health across China. Social change will only come when people are empowered.
I am a gay man who has seen the beginning of AIDS in the U.S. This disease took away my lover and many friends. Now I am seeing it happening in China. The Chinese government and the gay community groups there are over-zealous in free condom distribution, and under-prepared in true behavior change. Singular lectures and dragging people to be tested by the government CDC are the opposite of what ought to be done. Most of the HIV intervention strategies do not work for gay men.
I am passionate about changing the epidemic in China as well as the culture of treating gay men as statistics. My most current project is a rights-based HIV testing which introduces the idea of a client-centric protocol. All the training seminars are based on group discussions and discoveries. Above and beyond, team building is the ultimate goal.
In the winter of 2003, I helped co-found the AIDS Relief Fund for China in San Francisco. We created a small grant project to foster start-up groups and innovative projects. During the first 5 years of operation, we initiated the idea of Penpal Club to help AIDS affected children in rural areas, co-founded the Sunshine Doctors and PFLAG China (Parents, Families, and friends of Gays and Lesbians), and funded many community-based projects, like the Soymilk Stations which provided rural people with HIV with a bowl of soymilk a day as a protein supplement.
In the last three years, I launched two projects focused on gay men's health, Heart Talk Support Groups and the Quality Rapid Testing. Both ideas involve recruiting 40 community based organizations in 40 cities to implement support groups or HIV rapid testing.
With my bi-culturale and bilingual background, I can be an effective conduit to bring new ideas to communities that may have not the opportunities to learn about them. For example, social-psycho intervention for gay community in fighting HIV.
Currently, I am looking into effective safer sex experiential education that do not require lecturers.
