Dallas-HIV/AIDS
Our first volunteering day was quite eventful to say the least! We were all up bright and early tweeting over breakfast. Rose (one of our site leaders) has already sent 100 tweets. After a lovely drive in Dallas rush hour we made it to Resource Center Dallas. Resource Center Dallas is the primary lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and HIV/AIDS service organization in North Texas. Our group diplomatically divided into two groups and got our assignments for the week. Every day, half of our group will help make a hot meal for members of the Dallas community who are HIV positive and in need of a good meal and the others will help at the Resource Center food pantry. The food pantry is also solely for those who are fighting HIV/AIDS. Many of the people at the pantry were very excited to meet all of us and told some very tall tales! We all had so much fun at the Resource Center and are very excited to go back bright and early tomorrow!
For anyone interested in Resource Center Dallas here's a link to their website: http://www.resourcecenterdallas.org/!
Fortunately for us, we got to serve at two organizations today and spent the end of our day at Abounding Prosperity Inc. Abounding Prosperity is a community-based organization founded in 2005, with a mission to provide services to address health, social and economic disparities among African American men with a particular emphasis on gay, bisexual and male to female Transgender individuals and their families in Dallas County. We met all the extremely passionate, intelligent, caring, and innovative members of their team, who dedicate their lives to HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention.
Check out their website, too: http://aboundingprosperity.org/leadership.html
Dr. Adkins taught our group about CTR, which stands for Counseling, Testing, and Referral. These are the main techniques implemented by Abounding Prosperity to help prevent HIV infection in the community they live in. They were extremely proud to show off their new office buildings to our group and needed our assistance in some power cleaning so they could finally finish their three-month long renovation/relocation process! After beating chairs and squeegee-ing the windows we called it a day and admired the sparkling clean offices of Abounding Prosperity.
We finished our night off with a delicious and nutritious Kindergarten dinner. The Disney Pandora station was a wonderful addition and we finished our night with a lovely group discussion of our day and of course a Twitter fiesta!
Viva La Vida,
ASB Dallas
Liz Oliver
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