By Rynn Myles Closing the Loop Across the first four blogs, we traced how HIV stigma began, how respectability shaped care, how institutions built systems that reflect their fears, and how those fears turned into cycles that continue to harm people today. Every part of this series has revealed something uncomfortable but liberating. Stigma is not an accident. It is a pattern, a cycle, and a design. And anything designed can be redesigned. This final blog is the blueprint. Not

by Rynn Myles There is a pattern in HIV work that most people feel long before they can name it. It shows up in clinics, research protocols, policy conversations, and in the ways communities talk about help that does not actually help. In the last blog, I dug into how stigma becomes institutionalized through data, policy, and funding. This installment picks up that thread and turns it toward the bigger structure. I want to untangle the cycle that stigma creates: the way it tr

by Rynn Myles In the first two installments, I explored the quieter, everyday forms of HIV stigma — the kinds that slip into how we talk about responsibility, compliance, and worthiness without ever naming themselves as stigma. Those pieces centered what happens between people and within programs. This installment steps further back to look at something harder to confront: how stigma is baked into the very architecture of our systems. It is embedded in the policies we defend,

by Ashley Heidebrecht, LMSW, DRIEP Director Today is World AIDS Day. This year, for the first time ever since its inception in 1988, the United States government has chosen not to recognize this day. In the midst of incredible cuts to funding for HIV and AIDS research and programs, this choice speaks volumes. A new UNAIDS report shows just how fragile our progress against HIV really is. Sixty percent of women-led HIV organizations have been deeply affected by recent funding c