NZAF to honour Mama Tere and past chairs

Posted in: New Zealand Daily News
By GayNZ.com Daily News staff - 23rd September 2010

12.07PM: The NZ AIDS Foundation is to honour a transgender prostitutes' outreach worker and three of its past Trust Board chairs, who are amongst seven new Life Membership recipients to be honoured in late November.

Governor General and NZAF patron Sir Anand Satyanand will present the honours at a Government House function. Receiving life memberships will be Mama Tere Strickland, a South Aucklander who has worked on and off with that region's transgender sex workers, was a two-year Trust Board member and unsuccessfully stood to return to the Board last year.

Past chairs of the Foundation to be honoured include lawyer Charles Chauvel, now a Labour MP, and Michael Stevens, now an Auckland-based researcher, and Christchurch GP Grahame Carpenter, who shouldered one of New Zealand's highest GP case-loads of people with HIV.

Southland sexual health nurse Shona Fordyce is also being made a life member, as is long-time NZAF volunteer and NZ Prostitutes Collective worker in Christchurch Anna Reed. Also from Christchurch, Dianne Shannon, who was an early trainer of volunteers for the NZAF and continues to work in the field, will be honoured.

"We are very grateful to these people who have made an invaluable and meaningful contribution to the communities we serve and our mission of preventing the transmission of HIV and supporting people affected to maximise their health and wellbeing," says the Foundation in a draft statement which accompanied advice of the nominations and which was this morning leaked to GayNZ.com.