Ben Sedilos profile

DETROIT – Ben Sedilos has only been with the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation for three months, but he's already making a big impression. As program coordinator for Salud, which means "health" in Spanish, Sedilos has a variety of responsibilities.
"We offer a lot of different services to the Detroit community, including free HIV testing and counseling, skills building workshops for Latino women, community and street outreach for commercial sex operators and drug users, safer sex packets and school presentations," said Sedilos, who also acts as facilitator for Hermanos de Corazon (Brothers of the Heart), a personal development group for men who have sex with men that focuses on HIV prevention.
Sedilos had worked with a group similar to Hermanos de Corazon in his hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, but only on a volunteer basis. His full-time gig there – as it initially was upon his move to Detroit – was working with a Head Start program. But what started out as another volunteer opportunity quickly turned into a career move.
"I looked at HDC as a way to sharpen my Spanish skills and I got involved and the ball just started rolling," said Sedilos. "They were looking for a new coordinator and I was looking for a new job. And I had wanted to get back to working the LGBT community for quite a while."
Once he had secured his new position, though, Sedilos was in for a few surprises.
"I expected that since I was Latino I would automatically have an idea of the needs of the Detroit Latino community with regard to HIV prevention," he said. "But I found that the Latino population in Detroit is very diverse and it's taken me some time to learn about the different cultures that exist in the Detroit Latino community."
Another challenge was the difference in the size of the Hispanic population between Albuquerque and Detroit.
"In New Mexico there was a very large Latino population, but in Detroit the Latino population only comprises about four percent of the entire city," said Sedilos. "And although it's growing at a fast rate it still comprises a very small percentage of the community."
One aspect of the population that's the same in Albuquerque as it is in Detroit is the large percentage of homophobia, which is due largely in part to the fact that most Hispanics come from Catholic backgrounds.
"The LGBT community within the Latino community … it's very closeted and that makes reaching out to individuals a challenge," Sedilos said. "In regard to HIV in general, there's a very big stigma attached to HIV in that HIV is still very much associated with being gay. So it makes HIV prevention within the heterosexual community challenging as well."
But by all accounts, Sedilos is up for the challenge.
"We're working on expanding our current programming," he said. "We have specific grant objectives and we're wanting to expand on those with other grants and funding sources to be able to better meet the needs of the greater Latino community of Detroit, including the Latino LGBT community."