Pride in Harm Reduction: Rainbow Community Leadership Series

Join us for this sexy series on sexual health and substance use for the LGBTQ2SI+ community, grounded in harm reduction and sex positivity.

About this Event
Are you interested in making sex safer and more pleasurable? Want to keep yourself and others safe in a party atmosphere? Keen to learn more about gender? Eager for education about new developments in HIV treatment + prevention? Curious about cruising?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, come check out our brand new LGBTQ2SAIP+ leadership series! Featuring an array of presenters and lifetimes of lived expertise, this series will bring you the knowledge you need to be a sexual health and harm reduction leader in your community. Join us online on Mondays from 6:30 – 8:30pm throughout the summer to up your sexual health and harm reduction knowledge, get your questions answered, and come together in community – from a distance.

Honoraria are available to workshop participants – more info below!

Workshop Info

• July 20, 2020
  • Queer Sexual Health & Sexually Transmitted Infections
• July 27, 2020
  • PEP, PrEP & U=U // HIV Then & Now Panel of Lived Experience
• August 10, 2020
  • Hanky Panky + Pandemics: Navigating Sexual Wellness and COVID-19 // Sex, Sex Work and COVID Panel Discussion
• August 17, 2020
  • Gender 101 // At the Intersection of Gender and Queerness: Implications for Community and Health
• August 24, 2020
  • Identities, Body Image, and Harm Reduction // Baring Our Bodies: Panel of Lived Experience on Body Image and Harm Reduction
• August 31, 2020
  • Sex, Drugs, and Hepatitis C
• September 14, 2020
  • Party ‘n’ Play 101 // Harm Reduction and Benefit Maximization: Lived Experience Panel
• September 21, 2020
  • Cruising 101 + Consent // Panel on Tips, Tricks, and Experiences

How Will This Work?
Register for each workshop in the series that you’re interested in attending via Eventbrite. If you have difficulty registering, contact marshall.kilduff@avi.org or taylor.teal@avi.org.

Workshops will be offered via zoom, an online platform for hosting meetings and education events. You will need a computer, tablet, or mobile device that connects to the internet in order to participate in the workshop.* On the day of the workshop, you will receive an email with a link that takes you to the event. Here’s a brief video on how to join a zoom meeting and use the features and here’s a video on how to change the name that appears in zoom. If you are new to zoom, please review these videos prior to attending your first workshop. We will have moderators on hand to provide some assistance with navigating the technology.

After the workshop, you will be directed to a link for an evaluation survey. You can use the survey to indicate whether you would like to receive honorarium for the workshop, as well as the best way of getting that honorarium to you.

Participants who attend 6 or more sessions will receive Certificates of Completion; we encourage participants to attend all of the sessions in the series if it’s possible for them to do so.

Territory Acknowledgement
While this event is being offered online, facilitators and panelists will be physically located on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations; the territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ people, specifically the Malahat Nation; and the territories of the T’Sou-ke, Pacheedaht, and Scia’new Nations. We are profoundly grateful to live and work on these territories, as folks with Settler heritage.

We also acknowledge that colonial understandings of gender and sexuality have been violently imposed on Indigenous people and communities, here and throughout the world, as part of colonization and with consequences. We invite participants in this series to explore the links between gender and colonization through their own research. Here’s a video to get you started:  We also encourage participants to find out more about the territory they live on. Check out the Native Land website to learn more!

Accessibility and Privacy Considerations:
We are offering this event online as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We recognize that hosting events online impacts their accessibility in complex ways, and that online events are not accessible for everyone. We hope to offer these workshops in person in the future, when it is safe to do so – please contact marshall.kilduff@avi.org or taylor.teal@avi.org / 250-384-2366 ext 3112 if you’d like to be notified of in-person workshop opportunities.

Workshops will include verbal presentations alongside visual elements (PowerPoint slides and occasional videos), as well as automatically generated captioning. Panel discussions will also be captioned.

Portions of the event will be recorded (with presenter consent) so that they can be offered at a later date. There are several measures in place to protect your privacy:

When you enter the zoom meeting, you will be placed in a virtual waiting room until the workshop starts. When the workshop does start, your audio will be muted and your video will be turned off automatically, so no one will be able to hear you or see you unless you unmute yourself and turn on your video. To give yourself additional privacy, you will be able to change the name that appears on your participant window. Here’s how to change your name in zoom.

If you want to ask a question anonymously, you will be able to do so by sending your question to the facilitator via the chat function. If you want to ask a question verbally in the discussion portion of the workshop, you will be asked if you’re okay with having your question recorded; the recording can be paused in the event that you don’t consent to recording.