{"id":10715,"date":"2026-08-20T20:57:56","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T20:57:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/translash.org\/?post_type=resource&p=10715"},"modified":"2026-08-20T20:57:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T20:57:58","slug":"southern-hiv-aids-awareness-day-2026-guide","status":"publish","type":"resource","link":"https:\/\/translash.org\/fr\/resources\/southern-hiv-aids-awareness-day-2026-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern HIV\/AIDS Awareness Day 2026: A Complete Resource Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On August 20th communities across the South celebrate Southern HIV\/AIDS Awareness Day<\/a>, known as SHAAD. It is a day built by the South, for the South. The Southern AIDS Coalition founded SHAAD in 2019 to redirect national attention toward an HIV epidemic that the rest of the country had largely stopped paying attention to, despite its ongoing and devastating impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year’s SHAAD theme is S.T.E.P. in Solidarity, short for Southern Trailblazers Empowering Progress. It’s a call to uplift Southern voices and build deeper intersectional collaboration at a moment when the region faces more threats to its public health infrastructure than it has in years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For queer and trans Southerners, especially Black trans women and Black queer men, HIV has never been an abstract statistic\u2014or an epidemic of the past. It’s a public health crisis shaped by decades of government neglect, lack of investment, stigmatization, and a healthcare system that too often refuses to even recognize those most vulnerable to the virus at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This guide centers the trans and queer-led organizations and advocates doing that work first, and the broader Southern HIV\/AIDS movement second. Because without the people doing the work, there is no movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The South makes up roughly 38% of the U.S. population but in 2024, when the CDC last collected this data<\/a>, the region accounted for 51% of new HIV diagnoses nationwide\u2014a ratio that has existed for the last decade. Research from Duke University<\/a> found that in the Deep South, Black residents were diagnosed with HIV at eight times the rate of white residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transgender people remain a small share of new diagnoses nationally, but these numbers are rising. Between 2018 and 2022, diagnoses among transgender women rose by 25%<\/a>. And over 40% of trans and gender nonconforming people newly diagnosed with HIV in 2022 were Black. A recent national research cohort tracking HIV among trans women found that a third of its participants<\/a> came from the South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These statistics are not inevitable, however. They’re the result of continued policy decisions to restrict Medicaid, limit access to comprehensive sex education, and  attack trans healthcare instead of funding it. This is why Southern HIV\/AIDS Awareness Day exists: to name these factors explicitly and to call for accountability. In other words, to say the quiet part out loud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year’s SHAAD comes at a time of intense instability. Throughout 2025 and into 2026, the Trump administration’s budget proposals<\/a> have sought to eliminate CDC HIV prevention funding entirely and have cut major pieces of the Ryan White HIV\/AIDS Program, the country’s core safety net for HIV care. House Republicans even proposed a 20% cut to Ryan White and a full end to federal HIV prevention spending. Ultimately, Congress rejected the deepest of those cuts in its final budget proposal, preserving funding on a bipartisan basis. But the damage had already been done in places like Mississippi, where grant terminations and clawbacks hit community organizations hard. My Brother’s Keeper, a Jackson-based nonprofit, lost more than $1 million in federal grants and had to close clinic locations, including a mobile unit that provided HIV testing. Staff watched years of work disappear within weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trans and Queer Led Organizations To Know and Support<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

These organizations are led by the same communities they serve. Supporting them directly is the simplest way to support this year’s S.T.E.P. in Solidarity theme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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The Knights and Orchid Society (TKO)<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Selma and Montgomery, Alabama
Founded in 2012 by Quentin Bell, TKO became Alabama’s first Black trans-led AIDS Service Organization. Under current executive director TC Caldwell (they\/them), TKO provides HIV and STI testing, gender-affirming primary care, and food, housing, and utility assistance for Black trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming people across rural Alabama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THRIVE SS<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Metro Atlanta, Georgia
Co-founded in 2015 by three Black gay men living with HIV, Dwain Bridges, Daniel Driffin, and Larry Scott-Walker, THRIVE SS built a peer support model that treats belonging as part of the treatment plan. Its programs include support groups, a public speaking group, and THRIVE House, transitional housing for HIV-positive Black gay men and transgender women. (Update: THRIVE SS closed in 2025)<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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My Sistah’s House<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Memphis, Tennessee
Founded in 2016 by Kayla Gore and Ellyahnna C. Wattshall, My Sistah’s House is a Black trans-led organization that grew out of Gore’s own experience with homelessness. It runs emergency housing, the Tiny House Project, and HIV testing and navigation services, primarily for transgender and gender nonconforming people of color.

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