Inad Quinones Rendon

Inad Quinones Rendon (he/him)

Philippines

Inad is representing Indonesia and currently resides in Thailand. In 2013, Inad began working with APCOM with a focus on advocacy, community development, and HIV programming in the Asia-Pacific region. His duties included creating legal environments, technical assistance to key population networks, organizational capacity strengthening, community monitoring, and country HIV program review, among others. Inad led community-engagements with the Global Fund and PEPFAR in regards to their funding processes. More recently, he led an initiative to contextualize the messages of “Undetectable=Untransmittable” in Asian countries. Since no size fits all, contextualization (including translation) was found to be effective in promoting greater understanding of U=U among community organizations in the Philippines. The messages based on U=U have inspired other PLHIV to open up and talk more about themselves and their own HIV diagnosis. Furthermore, accepting my own HIV status led to the evolution of my HIV activism from ‘passion’ to ‘core identity’. I hope to contribute even just a sprinkle of inspiration so that PLHIV can break free from HIV stigma and accomplish things they previously thought to be impossible.