Alliance Celebrates 59th Graduating Class of Peers

Graduates will become community leaders helping others navigate systemic inequities and achieve health and well-being

Photos from the moving ceremony here (Photo credit: David Nager/Alliance)

For three decades, Alliance for Positive Change has provided New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS and other chronic conditions with leadership and economic mobility opportunities through its renowned Peer training program.

On Monday, November 28th, Alliance celebrated the success of its 59th graduating class of the Peer Recovery Education Program (PREP) at a ceremony with graduates and special guests at The Door, its second consecutive graduation held there.

Alliance’s Peer Recovery Education Program (PREP) is a 6-week intensive capacity-building skills training program that harnesses the power of Peer mentoring to help others initiate and maintain healthy behaviors. PREP Cycle 59 participants received information on HIV, hepatitis C, STIs, harm reduction, outreach skills, overdose prevention, and more.

"My journey has been hard; I am a transwoman of color from Guyana. When I attended PREP Cycle 59, it was the first time I was given the chance to be myself. This experience has been life-changing for me [and] inspired me so much that I have decided to pursue the goal of becoming a social worker,” said Peer graduate Rare-Pearl in her address to her classmates at the ceremony. “Alliance helped me to set that goal, and I will work very hard to achieve it. I am no longer Rare-Pearl, the outcast, the shunned, the unworthy. I am a person who loves herself and is ready to reach back and help others come out of the darkness."

Peer graduates become community leaders who use their lived experience and training to help fellow New Yorkers facing health challenges. Since the first class in 1992, Alliance has graduated more than 1,500 people from its renowned Peer program.

During their training, Peers develop skills to coach and support New Yorkers to overcome health challenges, navigate systemic inequities, and achieve health and well-being. The Peer program connects low-income people to care and support, reduces the burden on under-resourced healthcare institutions, and creates more economic mobility for people who need it most. Each year, these community ambassadors connect with approximately 15,000 New Yorkers.

Funding for the Alliance Peer Recovery Education Program (PREP) is made possible through the generous support of the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute.

About Alliance for Positive Change

Alliance for Positive Change is a leading multiservice organization that provides low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS and other chronic conditions with access to quality health

care, housing, harm reduction, coaching, and our renowned peer training and job placement program that cultivates leadership and economic mobility. Alliance opened in 1991, at the height of the HIV crisis—a welcoming community of transformation and opportunity. Today, we deliver on the promise of positive change with services and resources that equip people to navigate systemic inequities and achieve health and well-being. Learn about all the ways we inspire positive change at www.alliance.nyc.

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The Power of Peers with SelectHealth

“Our jobs may be different now, but our goal is the same: to help members live healthier and better lives.” Check out this video made in collaboration with SelectHealth for the End the Epidemic Summit 2020, featuring Alliance staff member Peter Soter and Peer Navigator Daniel Edmund. They beautifully illustrate the importance of Peers and outreach, especially during the pandemic.

Verywell Health's HIV Series Features the Personal Stories of Four Alliance Team Members

The medically-reviewed Verywell Health team collaborated with Alliance for Positive Change to create “Health Divide: HIV” to share facts, social impact and socio-economic analyses of HIV. The series features intimate profile stories of Eugene Eppes, Ismael Ruiz, Lillian Anglada (for whom our Luis and Lillian Outreach Center is named) and Nicky Bravo. Read their moving stories for a better sense of the people behind the diagnosis. Thank you, Nicky, Lillian, Ismael and Eugene!

Honoring Transgender Awareness Week: Spotlight on Alliance’s Lexii Foxx

“I’ve been doing prevention training since way before I knew it was called that,” says Lexii Foxx, a Peer intern with Alliance for Positive Change. Lexii credits her intersectionality and personal journey with making her a strong ally for New Yorkers in need.

“Sometimes it’s just really hard for transwomen to feel they’re being understood. I’m black, queer, and trans, so that’s a lot of intersectionality,” Lexii says. Her identity makes her an authentic voice as she provides help to a plethora of New Yorkers. At Alliance, Lexii works with almost 30 people a week, while also helping co-facilitate women’s groups at Alliance.

Growing up in a conservative town in North Carolina, Lexii notes, “My family loved me, but was literally embarrassed to have me be around at family events.”

She knew she was a woman from a young age. She dropped out of high school to live in a small house with dozens of friends she met at a drag show. They called themselves the “Chanelles/Thug Misses,” and worked as escorts for survival.

Lexii lived in dozens of states in her teens and twenties, working as a model and a sex worker, all while teaching her friends about safer sex.

Transgender Awareness Week is a week when transgender people and their allies take action to bring attention to the community by educating the public about who transgender people are, sharing their stories and experiences, and advancing advocacy around the issues of prejudice, discrimination, and violence that affect the transgender community. For Lexii, this means “educating children on who LGBTQ+ people are, and breaking that generational stigma.”

“I believe you have to start at the root, which is our kids, and help young trans kids out, make them confident in their true selves. And if they want to transition young, make it easier for them.”

It also means decriminalizing sex work, which makes transgender women disproportionate targets of violence. 2021 is already the deadliest year on record for transgender people in America, with 45 reported murders, according to the Human Rights Campaign, disproportionately amongst Black and Latinx people.

Decriminalizing sex work is also a barrier to services. “Being a sex worker helped me reach out to other sex workers, helping them get tested, use condoms, and get access to counseling,” Lexii says.

Lexii was involved in helping people before she joined Alliance, but says that “Alliance is the best thing that has happened for me. I feel like I am a confident woman walking out the door to start every day because of Alliance.”

Lexii started working with Alliance when she was referred from the Peer program.

Lexii Foxx

“She’s amazing, and she’s going to do amazing work,” says Malika Minott, Prevention Assistant Manager at Alliance, and also a graduate of Alliance’s PATH to Jobs peer-training program. “Lexii opened herself up to our work and participated in workshops, trainings, and now, she does wellness checks, reminder calls, therapeutic check-ins, and really invests in people’s lives as a Peer.”

Working for leaders like Malika at Alliance has fueled and refreshed Lexii, and allowed her to be a shining star and public health educator. “I’ve noticed that everyone at Alliance goes the extra mile for their clients,” Lexii says. “I feel like I’ve found family here.”

Transgender awareness is essential to Lexii because people who don’t know openly trans people “are afraid of us, or have a stigma against us due to negative media, TV shows, and movies that make a mockery of us. The fact is, we are human and we deserve to coexist in life.”

To Lexii, it’s not just on members of the LGBTQ+ community to support transgender people. “Cisgender people who have platforms should offer them to us and help with job readiness. Help us have the same opportunities as anyone else,” she says.

Transgender Awareness Week takes place from November 13-19, leading up to the Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20, a day to memorialize those who have been killed as a result of transphobia. Please join Alliance in our efforts to support and honor those lost on this day and throughout the year.