Connect with us

Health & Fitness

Safe, Queer Space to Aid in Personal Fitness Goals

Classes are offered 6 a.m.-6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and there is one class at 9 a.m. on Saturdays. For more information, visit the website at: www.thequeergym.com/home

Published

on

Coach Nat and Person(s) from Queer Gym provided by Visit Oakland

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of public spaces that are deemed safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community, especially gyms. Nathalie Huerta, A.K.A Coach Nat, had experienced this firsthand and decided to take matters into her own hands.

She opened the first LGBTQ+ gym in the nation in 2010, the Queer Gym. 

With a mission statement in mind, “to create happy, healthy homos” the gym is owned and managed by members of the LGBTQ+ community and run completely online. While there is a physical gym, once the pandemic hit it made the transition to completely online to extend the reach into the community. This unique environment also offers personalized workouts for those who are transitioning.

The Queer Gym is located at 1243 E 12th St, Oakland in. The gym can be reached at  (510) 866-4250 and also on  Twitter and Facebook. Classes are offered 6 a.m.-6:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and there is one class at 9 a.m. on Saturdays. For more information, visit the website at: www.thequeergym.com/home

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Bay Area

New Marin County HHS Director Brings Breadth of Bay Area Experience

On Feb. 20, Dr. Lisa Warhuus, a psychologist with over 25 years of social services experience, will take over as Marin County’s new Director of Health and Human Services. She replaces Dr. Benita McLaren, who retired in December 2023.

Published

on

(File Photo) On Feb. 20, Dr. Lisa Warhuus will take over as Marin County’s new Director of Health and Human Services.
(File Photo) On Feb. 20, Dr. Lisa Warhuus will take over as Marin County’s new Director of Health and Human Services.

By Oakland Press Staff

 

On Feb. 20, Dr. Lisa Warhuus, a psychologist with over 25 years of social services experience, will take over as Marin County’s new Director of Health and Human Services.

She replaces Dr. Benita McLaren, who retired in December 2023.

“We feel very fortunate to have someone with Dr. Warhuus’ skills and ability join our executive team,” said Marin County Executive Matthew Hymel.

“Throughout her career, Dr. Warhuus has demonstrated an ability to bring stakeholders together to effectively address our most complex community challenges,” Hymel continued.

With the County of Marin, Dr. Warhuus will lead a team of over 800 full-time equivalent staff positions and manage an annual budget of $258 million.

Her annual salary will be $288,433 with benefits consistent with those received by other department heads.

Most recently, Warhuus served as the Director of Health, Housing, and Community Services for the City of Berkeley. In that role, she oversaw a budget of more than $100 million and more than 200 employees across various divisions, including Public Health, Mental Health, Environmental Health, Housing and Community Services, and Aging Services.

“It is a true honor to have been selected for this important position. I cannot wait to get to know the incredible community of Marin County and to collaborate with the dedicated team within the Department of Health and Human Services,” said Warhuus.

Before working for the City of Berkeley, Warhuus served as Director of Children and Youth Initiatives at the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency. Before that, she was an Associate Director. In that role, she “managed and cultivated partnerships that helped expand mental health programs in multiple school districts. She also championed culturally responsive health and wellness services that aimed to support vulnerable populations,” according to a Marin County press release.

For Berkeley, “Warhuus was also a vital member of the Senior Executive Team providing counsel to the City Manager, Mayor, City Council, and the public on matters pertaining to health and housing,” the press release continued. “Notably, she played a key role in initiatives such as the City’s response to COVID-19, contributing to the citywide emergency efforts, and spearheading the development of a 24/7 mobile crisis response for individuals facing mental health and/or substance use crises.”

Warhuus earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Berkeley and master’s and doctoral degrees from Aarhus University in Denmark.

Continue Reading

Community

Taxes on Sugar-Sweetened Drinks Drive Decline in Consumption

A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley—including those at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics—and elsewhere shows that after excise taxes were placed on sugary beverages, purchases declined dramatically and steadily across five American cities.

Published

on

Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley News.
Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley News.

By Elise Proulx

UC Berkeley News

A new study by researchers at UC Berkeley—including those at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics—and elsewhere shows that after excise taxes were placed on sugary beverages, purchases declined dramatically and steadily across five American cities.

Although other studies have evaluated the impact of beverage excise taxes—taxes on a per ounce basis–in a single city, this is one of the first that estimates the impact of local excise taxes on purchases and prices of sugar-sweetened beverages across multiple large cities.

The cities included Boulder, Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, and San Francisco, all of which implemented taxes between Jan. 1, 2017, and Jan. 1, 2018.

Sugar-sweetened beverages—such as sodas, fruit drinks, sports drinks, energy drinks, and sweetened coffee drinks—are the leading source of added sugars in the American diet, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

They are associated with serious negative health outcomes, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, kidney disease, non-alcoholic liver disease, gum disease, tooth decay, and other conditions.

Taxes on these types of beverages are promoted as a key policy to hold beverage companies accountable for and reduce the health harms associated with their products, but comprehensive analyses of such taxes have been difficult due to the absence of sufficiently large samples of data and methodological limitations.

“Estimating a more general, more accurate impact of local sugar-sweetened beverage taxes in the U.S. provides greater insight into the overall effectiveness of these taxes,” said study lead author, Scott Kaplan, who is an economics professor at the United States Naval Academy.

Kaplan received his PhD from the UC Berkeley Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 2021.  “This study may better inform the potential effectiveness of SSB taxes at the state or federal level.”

This new study builds on an earlier study that looked only at data from the city of Oakland.

The new study found that retail prices of sugar-sweetened beverages increased by 33.1% over the two years following tax implementation in each city studied, and that there was a corresponding decrease in purchases of 33% over the same timeframe.

The price increase and purchase decreases appeared immediately after the taxes were implemented and continued to be sustained months later. At the same time, there was no evidence that consumers were traveling to bordering areas without sweetened beverage taxes to make purchases there.

This study’s findings suggest that “these taxes are quite effective in terms of health outcomes and societal cost-savings,” said Kaplan. He hopes this may lead to similar policy action in other locations across the country, and at the state and national levels, as was done with tobacco taxes.

previous study co-authored by Dr. Kristine A. Madsen of UC Berkeley School of Public Health showed that tax revenue from sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) excise in seven cities were used to support initiatives to improve community health, develop human and community capital, and advance equity.

Authors include:  Scott Kaplan, US Naval Academy; Justin S. White, Boston University School of Public Health, Kristine A. Madsen and Sofia B. Villas-Boas, UC Berkeley;  Sanjay Basu, University of Toronto; Dean Schillinger, UCSF

This work was supported by grants from the National Institute on Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (R01 DK116852 and 2P30 DK092924), The California Endowment, the UCSF Diabetes Family Fund, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (U18DP006526).

Continue Reading

Activism

Rep. Barbara Lee Marks World AIDS Day with Critical Plea to Congressional Colleagues

“World AIDS Day is an opportunity to celebrate the incredible progress we have made toward becoming an AIDS-free generation. In the past two decades we’ve saved 25 million lives, especially among the Black community globally, through transformative programs like PEPFAR,” said Lee in a statement.

Published

on

By California Black Media

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA-12) marked Worlds AIDS Day on Dec. 1, with a critical call-to-action.

The Congressmember, who is running for U.S. Senate, urged her colleagues to pass legislation that will reauthorize the PEPFAR program, a U.S. government-supported global initiative that provides lifesaving HIV medications to people in the United States and around the world who can’t afford to buy them.

“World AIDS Day is an opportunity to celebrate the incredible progress we have made toward becoming an AIDS-free generation. In the past two decades we’ve saved 25 million lives, especially among the Black community globally, through transformative programs like PEPFAR,” said Lee in a statement.

In 2003, with bipartisan support — and after vocal and extensive advocacy by members of the Congressional Black Caucus — Congress passed the law approving the program. Former President George Bush, who famously championed the program, signed it into law.

On Nov. 30, Dr. Robyn Neblett Fanfair, acting division director in the Division of HIV Prevention at the National Center for HIV and the Centers for Disease Control, said the AIDS crisis is at a crossroads.

“Together with ongoing commitment, we can honor the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to HIV-related illness in the United States and millions worldwide by ensuring that everyone benefits equally from four decades of groundbreaking scientific advances,” Fanfair said in a letter.

The CDC estimates that 1.2 million people in America have HIV, and 1 in 8 carriers don’t know it.

Since its inception, the U.S. government has provided over $100 billion to support the PEPFAR program.

“For 20 years, PEPFAR has been one of our nation’s most profound and transformational investments globally. Five and a half million babies have been born HIV-free because of the critical work funded by the program,” Lee continued.

The PEPFAR program is credited with significantly lowering the AIDS death rates in Black communities across the United States, where there is still a disproportionate number of HIV cases and where incidents continue to increase. For example, in Los Angeles County, which includes California’s largest and most populous city, there was a 13% year-over-year increase in new HIV cases between the last two years, according to data compiled by the LA County Department of Health.

PEPFAR is also lauded for turning around the epidemic in Africa, where it was most severe when the initiative was established.

“On World AIDS Day, I call upon my colleagues in Congress to reignite the bipartisanship that has been linked to PEPFAR for so long and act swiftly to keep this lifesaving program alive,” said Lee.

To commemorate the 35th anniversary of World AIDS Day, the California State Capitol was illuminated in red light on the evening of Dec. 1.

Continue Reading

Subscribe to receive news and updates from the Oakland Post

* indicates required

CHECK OUT THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE OAKLAND POST

ADVERTISEMENT

WORK FROM HOME

Home-based business with potential monthly income of $10K+ per month. A proven training system and website provided to maximize business effectiveness. Perfect job to earn side and primary income. Contact Lynne for more details: Lynne4npusa@gmail.com 800-334-0540

Facebook

Trending

Copyright ©2021 Post News Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.