Celebrating the launch of Well Beyond 50

The Well Beyond 50 website was officially launched on Friday 1 April at the Victorian Pride Centre.

More than 53% of people living with HIV in Victoria are now over the age of 50. Some are newly or recently diagnosed, many are long term survivors.  These folks are gender and culturally diverse and their intersectional needs and priorities are just as diverse as the communities emerging in the modern response.

It is LPV’s commitment that the Well Beyond 50 website will continue to grow in content, opportunities to engage and maintain visibility as we age and provide trusted contemporary information on issues identified by the positive community.

The website was launched by  Professor Mark Stoove, Head of Public Health and co-Head of the HIV Elimination Program at Burnet Institute and Richard Keane, CEO of Living Positive Victoria. Keane said that

“Within the modern HIV response, it is easy and sometimes convenient to forget that there’s a proud 40-year history to Victoria’s positive voice movement – a history begun in darker times – times of grief and of loss that are both community wide and intensely personal.  A time of staring down mortality, of illness, of treatment trials, and sadly, of overt and relentless stigma and discrimination from outside and from inside our own communities. But it was also a time of a stoic determination to not only survive, but, against all odds, to thrive.  It has been our ability to self-advocate; to speak to and to share our lived experience; to assist each other to navigate confronting, difficult terrain; and of working tirelessly to create the very foundations of the meaningful involvement of people living with HIV at every level of the response that impact our lives today.  I encourage everyone to engage with the website and the diversity of issues addressed within it – health, social support and future planning information.  It’s a resource not only designed by and for people living with HIV,  but for family, for carers and supporters of people ageing with HIV.”

To view the website go to: wellbeyond50.livingpositivevictoria.org.au

Photo: Susan Paxton, HIV Community Advocate and long term survivor addresses the audience at the launch.