Rachel Jones is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, the State University of NJ, College of Nursing, on the Newark Campus.

I became a registered nurse thirty years ago. My Bachelor of Science in Nursing is from Case Western Reserve University. After years working in emergency rooms, intensive care units, medical wards, and public health in Newark (BI and who remembers Martland Hospital?), Jersey City (the Medical Center) and NYC (NYU and BI), I became a family nurse practitioner, with a Masters Degree in Family Primary Care from Pace University.

As a family nurse practitioner I found that there were women and men who continued to have unprotected sex even though they were aware that their partners may be with other women—and even though they knew someone with HIV. I would see women and men return to my clinic with sexually transmitted infections even though we talked about how to reduce risk. Living in Jersey City, and with friends in Newark and New York, the epidemic was around me. I returned for my PhD at New York University and studied HIV risk in urban women.

We have held focus groups with women in Newark and Jersey City and wrote the stories based on women’s realities. Today, we have conducted our research with over 1,000 women and have created these soap opera videos. The videos resonate with women’s trials and tribulations in relationships with men. They also show women as they grow and change and their wisdom emerges. We talk about power as knowing participation in change (the work of Elizabeth Ann Barrett). Women are shown realistically and with the respect they deserve.

Our goal is to share the wisdom of women with women who are not yet in touch with their power as women. The creation of the videos was funded by grants from the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Library of Medicine, the Rutgers University Busch Biomedical Research Grant, with great support from the Rutgers, College of Nursing.

These videos could not have been developed without the women in the community sharing their wisdom, without Alan Roth, our filmmaker, Bob Nahory the digital applications developer, the actors-whose talent is dazzling, without Tina Truncellito-research assistant, nursing student, turned web master, and without the hard work and genius of student research assistants: Kianna Cromedy, Esmeralda Valle, and Shauday Rodney of the Rutgers College of Nursing Educational Opportunity Fund. This work is dedicated to promoting health in the community and an end to HIV/AIDS here and abroad.

 

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