SWACE powered by Queer Life dba Queer Northwest

The focus of Stephaun Wallace Advocacy and Community Engagement Division (SWACE) powered by Queer Life is to bolster, support, and empower Black and Brown communities to be healthy, build capacity for self-sufficiency, and enhance the health and well-being of the community via the intersectionality of art and health. 

What SWACE does:

  • Promotes health equity via policy development, community engagement, education, and information dissemination.

  • Protects the health and well-being of community members with client-centered interventions and knowledge of health policies. 

  • Provides referrals to quality health and social services through collaboration with adolescents and young adults via available resources in the community.

  • Provides culturally and ethnically sensitive services to the community.

  • Cultivates safe space events, classes, and seminars to build community.

  • Engages in on-going planning and evaluation in partnership with the community.

Hold That Pose for Me

Hold That Pose for Me is a mini ballroom competition and health education series aimed to educate QTBIPOC youth and young adults about ballroom history, ballroom culture, and health resources. The series will allow community members ages to compete in mini balls that will present a variety of categories to promote inclusivity and build confidence.

Community members will compete in an array of categories and learn the history of these categories in educational sessions prior to the competition facilitated by ballroom community members who are experts within those respected categories. Also, community members will be educated on HIV prevention and treatment options offered by local community-based organizations.

The arts and culture of the ballroom community will be featured as the primary focus as it will introduce many millennials to ballroom history that reflects and impacts the ballroom community of the present. The art of dance, fashion design, creative direction, music composition, and sound engineering will allow many community members to become well versed in the components of putting on a ballroom event, capacity building, and healthcare messaging