Pioneering HIV/AIDS advocate and organizer Dázon Dixon Diallo will present the next Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard lecture. Diallo, founder and president of Atlanta-based SisterLove, Inc., will give a lecture entitled “Intersexions: Sexual Health, Human Rights and Global HIV/AIDS” on March 22 at 5:30 p.m. in the Chapel.
Diallo will discuss the 25-year journey that has pitted her against the oppression of women and girls and the battle against HIV/AIDS in the American South and in South Africa.
SisterLove, Inc. was established in 1989 and was the first women’s HIV/AIDS organization in the Southeast. Diallo pioneered women’s HIV/AIDS and reproductive justice and developed a seminal prevention intervention that is now included in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Compendium of Evidenced-based HIV Prevention Interventions.
She also established the first transitional housing program for HIV-positive women and children, with a long-term vision for those women to be leaders in the fight against HIV/AIDS, as well as promoters of women’s human rights.
In 2001, she opened a SisterLove office in Mpumalanga, a South African rural province located near Johannesburg, where the program is working to build a sustainable development for local women-led HIV/AIDS organizations.
Diallo hosts a weekly radio program focused on African-American women, called Sistas’ Time, on WRFG 89.3 FM and www.wrfg.org in Atlanta. She has coordinated delegations of African-American women and allies to Brazil, China, Egypt, Jamaica, South Africa, Senegal and Uganda.
Diallo’s influence and work branches out from SisterLove into many other organizations and committees. She is a founding board member of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and Trust Black Women Coalition
She chairs the Fulton County HIV/AIDS Services Planning Council and the steering committee of the Global Campaign for Microbicides, a diverse network of advocates and nongovernmental organizations working to expand HIV prevention options. She co-chairs the community advisory board of the HOPE Clinic, Emory University’s HIV vaccine and microbicides research center.
Her work with women’s human rights and HIV/AIDS has garnered Diallo many awards over the past 25 years, including receiving the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement Award, being named one of the 25 most influential women in Atlanta, receiving the community-based organization recognition award from Black Entertainment Television Foundation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Outstanding HIV/AIDS Awareness and Prevention Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.
Diallo graduated from Spelman College with a bachelor’s degree and from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a master’s degree in public health. She serves as an adjunct faculty member in women’s health for the Morehouse School of Medicine’s master’s of public health program.
The Global Diseases: Voices from the Vanguard lecture series features international experts in the battle against infectious diseases that kill millions each year.
The series is a joint effort of Patricia Thomas, UGA’s Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Daniel G. Colley, director of UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases. After each lecture in the Chapel, a reception is held next door at Demosthenian Hall.
