From Risk to Reasons: A Guide for Communicating and Connecting with Black Women about HIV

ViiV Healthcare’s Risk to Reasons initiative is designed to reframe and refocus HIV prevention and care for Black women of cis and trans experience. Guided by advocates across the country, Risk to Reasons sets out to develop new messages, new messengers, and new methods to increase awareness and action around HIV. Through creating content, funding community action, and connecting advocates across the country, it aims to change the impact of HIV in Black communities and connect more Black women to prevention and care.

The Risk to Reasons guide was co-created by ViiV Healthcare and the Black Women’s Working Group to Reframe Risk, a committee of Black women living with and working in HIV, collaborating with ViiV Healthcare to challenge existing HIV prevention approaches and develop new recommendations for communicating and connecting with Black women about HIV.

This guide is both an invitation and a request to rethink and reframe how HIV prevention and services for Black women are discussed and designed. It is a call to adopt an empowering narrative that reflects the diverse and complex experiences of Black women, and to activate individual and collective responses.

It is intended to ignite advocates, educators, doctors, nurses, journalists, mothers, lovers, daughters, sisters, wives and friends to catalyze critical conversations and action around HIV in order to support the sexual, mental and physical health and well-being of Black women.

In this guide, we share insights, reflections and recommendations to strengthen communications with and about Black women with regards to HIV prevention. These insights will help advocates, service providers, communicators, researchers and the broad networks surrounding Black women better understand the circumstances, challenges and motivations that impact Black women’s use of prevention and care strategies. The content of this guide represents the next step in a collective journey to improve communication with and about Black women and HIV, strengthen connections to prevention and care and disrupt the disproportionate impact of HIV among Black women.

Initiative funded and implemented by ViiV Healthcare
Writing by: TCC Group
Photography and Design by: Harley & Co

Key Contributions as the Black Women’s Working Group to Reframe Risk: Gina Brown, Jamanii Brown, Tori Cooper, Olivia G. Ford, Justine Ingram, Deirdre Johnson, Leisha McKinley-Beach, Kneeshe Parkinson, Jay Reed, Beverly Ross, Kimberly Sanders, Ashlee Wimberly