Coordinators for an American Red Cross program that will provide AIDS education to the Salt Lake area Hispanic and Black communities have been named.
Virginia Lopez will be the Hispanic Community Education Coordinator and Sandra Adams will fill the Black Community Education Coordinator post.
Lopez previously worked as coordinator for Project Esperanza, an intervention program for runaway and troubled youths at the Institute of Human Resource Development. She has also been a counselor at the YWCA Teen Home. She now attends the University of Utah.
Adams served as Granger Elementary PTA president in 1987 and was responsible for organizing "Reflections on the Past with Eyes on the Prize," a conference highlighting the civil rights movement. The project was organized in conjunction with the Utah Department of Education. She has also attended the U. of U.
The women are expected to begin establishing contacts with Salt Lake's social, cultural, governmental and church organizations to ensure that AIDS prevention information is available to all.
The program is being funded by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control through the Utah Department of Health. The new programs are intended as an enhancement of the Red Cross' public-education program begun two years ago, and are intended to approach the minority communities on a peer-to-peer level with culturally relevant materials, workshops and classes.