Who we are is what we do.

Founded as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization in 1983, NAPWA advocates for the lives and dignity of all people living with HIV/AIDS, especially the more than a million Americans who live with it today. We want the epidemic to end, and we want life to be better for people with HIV until it does.

Some of our work is legislative. We work with Congress and the Administration to achieve public policy that will be effective in ending the HIV epidemic. We work to ensure adequate – even generous, when possible – funding for public awareness programs, testing, treatment, and support services. We educate legislators and policy makers about other issues people with HIV often have to live with – housing insecurity, substance abuse, poverty, homophobia, stigma. We are squarely on the record against making sexual activity criminal for people with HIV.

Some of our work is public education. We created National HIV Testing Day, an annual event urging all Americans to Take the Test, Take Control. In an era when more and more people think the crisis is past, we create campaigns like National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, to tell high-risk populations, no, it isn’t. And we use our web presences – this website and our Positive Voice newsletter, among others – to help people living with HIV find the information and support services they need and deserve.

Some of our work helps communities develop resources to help themselves. We present Capacity Building Assistance seminars around the country, sharing the skills cities and towns, regional organizations, and activists need to get the safe(r) sex message out, promote testing, link those who test positive to treatment and support services, and fight stigma. We help individuals living with HIV learn how to tell their stories, so their communities can’t go on saying, “It doesn’t happen here,” or, “It only happens to those people.” We train and support peer counselors, people living with HIV who help others from similar ethnic, educational, and economic backgrounds understand their treatment choices and navigate what can be an impossibly complicated care system.

NAPWA grew out of the AIDS activism of the early 1980's, when community leaders understood that we who were living with the virus needed to speak for ourselves at all levels of discussion of the epidemic. At the Second National AIDS Forum, convened in Denver, Colorado in 1983, the Patient Advisory Committee presented two major initiatives. One was the Denver Principles, declaring the right of people living with the virus to be at the table when policy is made, to be treated with dignity, and to be called (in those days) people with AIDS, not AIDS victims. The other was the outline of a national membership organization for PWAs to implement the principles.

From that outline, NAPWA grew. For nearly three decades now, NAPWA has been the trusted, independent voice for the more than one million Americans now living with HIV and AIDS. Some things have changed in thirty years; HIV is now a virus we live with, not one we have to die with. Other things have not. We still need a place at the policy table. We still need to educate our communities. We still need to help Americans living with the virus find information and services. We work to make those things happen. Who we are is what we do.