Staying Visible: What I Brought Home From USCHA
Posted: September 28, 2026
If you do a conference right, you should leave exhausted, not from travel or long days in conference rooms, but from the sheer weight of knowledge, people, and conversation your mind is still trying to process. And somehow, you should also leave re-energized. That is what USCHA does for me every year.
The United States Conference on HIV/AIDS brings together people who have spent decades building this movement alongside people walking into these conversations for the first time. Advocates, researchers, service providers, long-term survivors, younger voices and older voices, everyone carrying a different piece of the same story.
This year’s USCHA landed in a particular season of my life. I am closing in on my bachelor’s degree, with 24 credit hours to finish before December 20. At the same time, I arrived as the newly elected Chair of the National HIV & Aging Advocacy Network (NHAAN). That changed how I moved through the conference. I was there to learn, present and connect, but also to listen, stay visible to our members, sit with our co-chairs, and help push forward our workplans and strategic planning.
So my USCHA looked a little different. I barely left the hotel, only once, and even that was work. Between sessions, you’d find me in the lobby, laptop open, doing homework. I would not change that.
There was something important about working in the lobby instead of disappearing into my room. People could see I was deep in an assignment, and they respected the space. But they also knew when to pull me up for air, a quick joke, a smile, a hug, before I went back to it.
Those small moments taught me something about presence that reaches far past any one conference: there is a difference between attending and being visible. Visibility doesn’t mean being everywhere or always talking. It means staying part of the community around you, and people notice both presence and absence.
Some of the most meaningful connections at USCHA never happen in a session. They happen in a hallway, at breakfast, near an elevator, in a lobby, when someone sits down and picks up a conversation that started months earlier on Zoom. Stepping into the NHAAN Chair role made that kind of visibility feel even more essential. A member should be able to see me and stop to talk. A co-chair should be able to pull up a chair and keep working through a plan. Someone should be able to raise an idea without waiting for the next formal meeting. Sometimes leadership happens around a conference table. Sometimes it happens in a hotel lobby with an unfinished assignment staring back at you. Both matter.
Being elected Chair is something I’m proud of, but not a title I take lightly. For me, it isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about listening, understanding the goals our bylaws and workplans have already set, respecting what each group has agreed to do, and knowing when a conversation needs to move from idea to action, and when leadership means stepping back so the people doing the work can lead it.
USCHA let me practice that in real time. Being physically present with NHAAN members changed the conversation. Virtual meetings make national collaboration possible, but there’s something different about sitting together without watching a clock, letting one subject lead naturally into the next, what we’d accomplished, what still needed attention, what strategic planning should look like going forward. Mostly, I had the chance to listen.
I also stayed intentional about the conference itself. I was a panelist, presented my own iPoster, co-presented another, and met with leaders from several organizations. Conferences can overwhelm, so many sessions running at once that it takes real intention to find the ones that speak to your work. The plenaries mattered too, each one pushing me to think harder about where this movement is headed. Presenting let me share ideas; co-presenting meant learning alongside someone else; the meetings opened doors to future collaboration. My NHAAN role gave me a second lens on all of it, I wasn’t only thinking about what I was learning, but what we were building together.
The one time I did leave the hotel was for that same work. Through NHAAN’s LGBTQIA+ Special Interest Group, I helped organize a community event at Queens Lounge in Santa Ana, the final item on the SIG’s workplan for the year. A workplan shouldn’t just be a document we review in meetings; if it matters enough to write down, it matters enough to finish. The night also let me see community outreach through another city’s eyes. Community never looks the same twice, different organizations, relationships, spaces, rhythm.
Queens Lounge is a gay nightclub, and the event started later than planned, through no fault of our group, venues and staffing rarely cooperate on schedule. What I’ve learned over the years is that you roll with it. We adjusted, waited, kept things moving, and once it started, it was a wonderful night. That flexibility is its own kind of community engagement: enough structure to know what you’re building, enough give to change course when real life shows up. Watching that event come together belongs in my USCHA story as much as anything that happened inside the conference hotel.
I can’t separate this chapter from the people who helped build it. NMAC’s 50+ Strong & Healthy Cohort connected me to a wider community thinking seriously about aging with HIV, leadership and visibility. NHAAN is the next step in that same evolution. Leadership hasn’t erased where I came from, I still carry lived experience into these rooms, still learn from others, still need people to challenge my thinking. The people closest to an issue should help shape the decisions around it.
That’s also why I think so much about what happens after a conference ends. A conference can make thousands of people feel unstoppable together. Then the lights come down, the lanyard comes off, the suitcase gets unpacked, and real life starts again. That’s where it gets tested: What conversation do I continue? Who do I follow up with? What challenged something I believed? Who did I meet who should be connected to someone else? What did I hear that I now have a responsibility to share? What commitments did we make to each other? That’s how momentum becomes movement.
USCHA also left me thinking about where my own work is heading. HIV will always be part of my life and my work, it has taught me about stigma, access, prevention, treatment, aging, trust and voice. But none of us is simply HIV. Nobody walks into a health care setting carrying one diagnosis; we carry our whole lives, other chronic conditions, aging, mental health, isolation, money, transportation, housing, caregiving, food insecurity, grief, questions about intimacy, a health system that’s hard to navigate, and sometimes discrimination that makes trust hard to rebuild. Sometimes we just need someone to listen.
That’s why I keep thinking about whole-person-centered health. This movement has spent decades teaching health care that people can’t be reduced to a diagnosis, and that lesson shouldn’t stay inside HIV care. It belongs in the wider conversation about chronic illness, aging, patient advocacy and community engagement: meeting people where they are, valuing peer support and lived experience, fighting stigma, and insisting communities have a voice in their own health.
Maybe that’s why the image I keep returning to from this USCHA isn’t a plenary stage or a panel or even Santa Ana. It’s the hotel lobby, laptop open, schoolwork spread across the table, and people moving around me. Someone stops, we talk, I go back to work. A member walks by and a conversation about the organization starts. Someone laughs, maybe hugs me, and I return to the assignment. I was working toward one goal while staying present for another part of my journey.
Showing up doesn’t always mean being the center of the room. Sometimes leadership just means staying in it, visible, available, listening, helping a conversation move forward, following through on what people agreed to, and knowing when to lead and when to let someone else.
I came home from USCHA exhausted, and re-energized. Now comes the harder part: carrying that energy forward, continuing the conversations, strengthening relationships, following up, moving our workplans, using what I learned. Being Chair of NHAAN is a responsibility to listen and lead based on the goals our members have already set together. Leadership doesn’t begin the moment someone hands you a title, it’s demonstrated in what you do with it.
And already I’m thinking about USCHA 2027 and its theme, “Passing the Torch.” I’m not convinced passing the torch always means handing something over and stepping away. Sometimes it means running beside someone else for a while, sharing knowledge, making introductions, building opportunities, making sure they’re ready when their moment comes. Maybe this movement doesn’t need one generation to leave the relay so another can enter. Maybe we need more people running together.
So, I’m already asking how I’ll show up differently next year. Who can I encourage to submit an abstract, join a panel, build an iPoster? Who needs an introduction, or help finding funding? Who has lived experience or community knowledge worth sharing, but hasn’t yet realized their voice belongs in that room?
As I look toward what’s next, I keep coming back to the same ideas: see the whole person, listen to the community, stay visible, keep the conversation moving, and carry the momentum forward.
That’s what I brought home from USCHA. And that’s what I intend to carry into the next one.