February 24, 2020 – POZ.
by Oriol R. Gutierrez Jr.
Krista Martel is executive director of the Well Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 whose mission is to change the course of the HIV/AIDS pandemic through a focus on women and girls. She joined the group in 2009 as director of online services. When the founder, Dawn Averitt, stepped aside in 2013, Martel took on her current role.
Before The Well Project, Martel was vice president of Visionary Health Concepts, an independent, community-based medical education company. Before that, she was an account executive at World Health Communications, an international medical education agency. She has been working in HIV education since 1995.
What is the origin of The Well Project?
Diagnosed with HIV at age 19 in 1988, Dawn Averitt quickly realized there was very little women-specific information about the virus. That was even more the case when it came to research. The lack of women in clinical trials prevented knowledge of basic things, such as how HIV treatment may affect women differently than men.
So it became her mission to advance research about women and to increase participation in research and clinical trial design by women. She soon became one of the leading female HIV treatment activists in the United States and around the world.
After being asked repeatedly to be on advisory boards, attend conferences and make presentations, she realized there was a need for a centralized place for all this information. That’s how The Well Project was born. She remains an emeritus board member.
What are The Well Project’s focus areas?
We have five focus areas—education and information, community support, advocacy and leadership, collaborative engagement, and women-focused research.
One example under education and information is our fact sheets. We have them medically reviewed regularly. We have over 120 fact sheets now. We add new ones as our advisers identify gaps.
An example under community support is our blog, A Girl Like Me, which we added when I joined the organization. This blog of women’s voices has become an online community, a sisterhood and a support network. We have published more than 1,000 posts by over 80 bloggers from around the world.
Our advocacy and leadership focus area evolved from seeing how these women’s voices were having such a large reach through the blog and social media. We believed it was important to equip our women with the latest information about HIV treatment. That’s when we developed our webinars, which have grown to become a platform for us to help develop leadership.
We’ve accomplished that by asking our women to participate as speakers. That evolved into having them do presentations at conferences for us, which has expanded our presence as an organization and has helped them grow.
Under collaborative engagement are our community partners. In 2014, when we relaunched our website, we wanted anyone who came to us to be able to access other respected organizations. Each group gets a page. We have over 30 community partners [including POZ].
In addition to HIV groups, we are also establishing partnerships with more women-focused groups, including those focused on sexual and reproductive health, to help women living with HIV connect to other resources.
As for the women-focused research, much of that is accomplished through the Women’s Research Initiative on HIV/AIDS (WRI), which is now essentially an annual meeting. Founded in 2003, it started as kind of a think tank.
The idea was to be interdisciplinary with different people working on a topic from various angles. Participants included clinical researchers, social scientists, activists, clinicians, government folks and pharmaceutical industry representatives. Continue reading on POZ...
