Our Mission

The Community Education Group’s (CEG) work includes providing access to healthcare, public education, and job training, plus securing financial investments to underserved rural communities and community-based organizations in West Virginia and Appalachia.  

Our focus is to improve access by providing leadership and advocacy to scale resources and funding to combat the syndemic cluster of widespread disease and public health crises, including HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis, opioid addiction, and substance use disorder.

Our vision is that no matter where you live, what you do, or who you are, everyone deserves and has access to life-affirming resources for themselves and their families.

Our Roots

With its principal place of business located in Washington, D.C., the Community Education Group (CEG) was established 22 years ago as the National Women and HIV/AIDS Project (NWAP). NWAP was created to address the dearth of public policy forums available women living with HIV and their allies at that time. In 1994, NWAP convened one of the first national meetings for women living with HIV and their allies in Atlanta, GA. This meeting resulted in the development and dissemination of the National Women and HIV/AIDS Survey and the National Women and HIV/AIDS Policy Agenda. In 1996, due to limited funding sources specific to women especially, women of color-focused organizations, NWAP transformed into CEG. CEG built upon NWAP’s mission by maintaining a core focus on women living with and affected by HIV/AIDS and expanding its mission to not only address the evolving needs of African-American/Black women and their partners. CEG’s population focus also includes all people of color as well as other disenfranchised communities most vulnerable to HIV and HCV; including, but, not limited to African-American/Black men, ex-offenders, sex workers, substance users and transgender individuals.

CEG’s mission is and remains rooted in developing community-level strategies to stop the spread of HIV, HCV, and substance abuse and eliminate health disparities by developing replicable models for the use of other community and faith-based partners. Successful program design is accomplished through training indigenous persons to become community health workers, educating and testing the hard to reach, condom distribution, HIV screening, motivational interviewing and sharing our expertise with other organizations through national networks and local capacity building efforts. In the early 2000s, CEG successfully operationalized its mission through the development and implementation of its Community Health and Medical Personnel Services (CHAMPS) program. The innovative CHAMPS program was designed to increase linkage to care for HIV and HCV treatment. CEG’s model was lauded by Department of Health and Humans Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.”

What We Do

Stopping the Spread of Infectious Diseases

Stopping the spread of infectious diseases such as HIV and Hep C requires developing and implementing creative, viable, culturally appropriate programs and policies that reflect the needs and concerns of the communities most affected and infected—the communities they are designed to help. That means accounting for and addressing the daily, real-life challenges faced by people in those communities, including underlying and systemic health, socioeconomic, and environmental challenges such as access to fair employment, a good education, primary medical care, and substance abuse and pregnancy prevention programs.

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