Krista De La Rosa, left, and PJK Moton will speak at the HRC Mondays at Chino Chinatown on May 28.
Adam S. Johnson | HRC DFW Volunteer
It can be hard to keep up with the many issues facing LGBTQ people across North Texas. How do you find reliable perspectives on the problems that certain sub-demographics face within our community? And how do you figure out how to help them in ways that are truly impactful?
To help our community and its allies answer these questions, the HRC DFW Federal Club (one of the oldest and largest LGBTQ organizations in North Texas) has created HRC Mondays — a quarterly speaker and community engagement series that features speakers who discuss issues that the LGBTQ community faces.
The next HRC Monday is Monday, May 28, at Chinos Chinatown in Trinity Groves. It will address the unique issues that transgender people and people of color face while seeking healthcare.
Activists Krista De La Rosa and PJ Moton will be speaking and conducting a Q&A at the event.
Krista De La Rosa, a wellness counselor with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, is a proud trans woman who has spent the last two years working at AIDS Healthcare Foundation, conducting HIV tests and helping patients manage their care. She is passionate about giving back to the community and is an active volunteer with Impulse Group Dallas, LGBTQSaves and many other community non-profits.
De La Rosa is also the founder and host of the Krista De La Rosa Show, a live monthly showcase filmed in Dallas and streamed online. On her show, she and her guests talk all things gossip in DFW, celebrities and issues that the LGBTQ+ community faces.
Originally from Dallas, Krista grew up in a religious family and was heavily involved with Teen Mania Ministries, a national ministries organization that held faith-based youth rallies and retreats in the 2000s. Through her volunteer work with them, she developed a passion for managing volunteers and event planning, as well as organizing and encouraging people. She discovered that she had a love and understanding of stories from youth struggling with life’s challenges.
Despite her passion for Teen Mania Ministries, De La Rosa grew to feel that many of the organization’s participants were controlled by fear, which encouraged her to set out to combat the kind of fear that keeps people from being true to who they are. Since then, she has dedicated herself to organizing and uplifting the LGBTQ community, working to address the unique social challenges we face.
At HRC Monday, De La Rosa will discuss the many barriers that transgender people face when seeking out healthcare, like biases from providers and the lack of resources. She strives to bring more attention and understanding to the transgender community and hopes to shed light on the stigma that transgender people face.
P.J. Moton is the special projects manager for Abounding Prosperity Inc., an LGBTQ+ community center and healthcare clinic located in South Dallas. Born and raised in Alabama, Moton grew up feeling the oppression and poverty that most people of color in the South face.
His intelligence and hard work took him to Fisk University, where he graduated with a dual degree in psychology and sociology. From there he went on to earn his masters in social work at Washington University in St. Louis, which is one of the top MSW programs in the country. While in undergrad in Nashville, he got his start volunteering at Nashville Cares, an HIV/AIDS education and support organization.
After grad school, Moton made his way to Dallas and spent almost three years leading United Black Ellument (U-BE), a Resource Center organization that works to support young, black same-gender-loving men. He led that program for three years and was instrumental in growing and shaping it into a highly-regarded community outreach and support program. He eventually took the wisdom he developed there to Abounding Prosperity, where he’s worked for almost threeyears.
Moton will be talking about the inequality LGBTQ people of color face when accessing healthcare. His goal is to educate members of our community and allies alike on building a new network of people who can bring light to the experiences of black people when they are accessing healthcare.
Join us next week as De La Rosa and Moton share their unique perspectives to help us build understanding and strengthen our community at large. HRCMondays:Access to Healthcare will be held at Chino Chinatown in Trinity Groves from 6:30-9 p.m. A special thank you to Equality Vodka for their continuous support of HRC DFW Federal Club.