The Reunion Project met in Chicago to unite long-term HIV survivors and allies to find connection and support through a weekend of panels designed to instill community across generations.
“We want to bring people together to show their stories of survival and resilience,” said Reunion Project Executive Director Jeff Berry. “There’s hope in community, and there’s strength in community, and there’s love in community.”
Berry, whose work dates back to the 1980s, co-founded the Project in 2015 following town halls in San Francisco that spurred the question: “Well, we survived. But now what?”
The Reunion Project seeks to destigmatize the still-prevalent fears and isolation left in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, imploring survivors not to feel like marginalized members of the community they helped build.
“There’s a lot of PTSD, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse among people who have survived all that trauma. There’s a lot of resilience, too,” Berry added.
The event, hosted at Loyola University Chicago’s Kasbeer Hall, 25 E. Pearson St., on Feb. 27 and 28, brought in panelists including Kim Hunt, the executive director of Pride Action Talk, and Myron Krys of The Depth Collective. Ultimately, the goal of the event—the Reunion Project’s fifth of this kind—is to offer those living with HIV, particularly older adults, resources to “improve their quality of life,” Berry shared.
Through discussions of navigating intimacy through modern dating apps and experiences to broader conversations around finding community within survival, Berry wanted to create a safe-space for people living with HIV, pivoting from earlier conventions to allow for more interpersonal communication and engagement. Berry hopes the convention will inspire further intergenerational connection.
“We’re not going be able to do this forever,” Berry added. “We really want to inspire younger generational leaders to take the helm and devise the programs and systems that are needed, in particular when all of these are under attack by the current administration. We’re really gonna need that leadership.”
“We built the very systems that after many years, we felt as though they had left us behind and forgotten about people aging with HIV, so there’s a continued interest in solution-oriented programming, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Reunion Project looks to inspire next generation of people living with HIV
