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Comings & Goings
Galloway wins Gold Anvil Award from PRSA
The ‘Comings & Goings’ column chronicles important life changes of Blade readers.
The Comings & Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].
The Comings & Goings column also invites LGBTQ+ college students to share their successes with us. If you have been elected to a student government position, landed an exciting internship, or are graduating and beginning your career with a new job, let us know so we can share your success.
Del Galloway (Photo by David Posey)
Congratulations to Del Galloway, APR, Fellow PRSA, who was awarded the Gold Anvil Award by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). This is the society’s highest individual honor recognizing lifetime achievement in public relations. As president and CEO of PRSA in 2004, Galloway established the Society’s first National Diversity Committee, and is the Society’s first openly gay president and CEO. He is an architect of Universal Accreditation, a designation adopted by multiple communications organizations recognizing excellence in public relations.
Upon presenting the award PRSA National Chair Anthony D’Angelo said, “Del Galloway has contributed leadership, vision and strategic thinking through a range of practice sectors and successful roles, demonstrating his versatility, energy and collaborative spirit. I’m proud to call him my mentor and friend, and congratulate him on this fitting honor.”
Currently, Galloway is vice president of communications at Wells Fargo’s Atlantic Region responsible for all media relations and internal communications in Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Previously he served as vice president of communications at United Way Worldwide, the world’s largest privately supported nonprofit.
He has worked for Young & Rubicam, Cohn & Wolfe, and Husk Jennings Galloway + Partners, where he was co-owner of the Florida-based advertising and public relations agency. He also previously worked as director of corporate communications at AT&T American Transtech, a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T.
Throughout his career, Galloway has managed a number of complex and successful communications programs. These include the start-up of a multi-national business, employee communications during a global downsizing, an image campaign for a major financial institution, a public awareness campaign for public broadcasting, an anniversary celebration for the world’s largest privately supported nonprofit, and multiple crisis communications programs.
Galloway is an accredited practitioner (APR) and a member of PRSA’s College of Fellows. He is a founding member of the Universal Accreditation Board and is a past chair of the North American Public Relations Council. He served in 1990 as president of the Florida Public Relations Association and is the recipient of FPRA’s “Dillin Award” for lifetime achievement in public relations. He also a member and past chair of the Public Relations Advisory Council at the University of Florida.
In 2006, Galloway received a fellowship at the University of Florida and was named the Freedom Forum Visiting Professor. He holds a master’s degree in communications and a bachelor’s degree in public relations from the University of Florida, where he is honored as an “Alumni of Distinction.”
District of Columbia
Mayor Bowser signs bill requiring insurers to cover PrEP
‘This is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on March 20 signed a bill approved by the D.C. Council that requires health insurance companies to cover the costs of HIV prevention or PrEP drugs for D.C. residents at risk for HIV infection.
Like all legislation approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, the bill, called the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act, was sent to Capitol Hill for a required 30-day congressional review period before it takes effect as D.C. law.
Gay D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) last year introduced the bill.
Insurance coverage for PrEP drugs has been provided through coverage standards included in the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But AIDS advocacy organizations have called on states and D.C. to pass their own legislation requiring insurance coverage of PrEP as a safeguard in case federal policies are weakened or removed by the Trump administration, which has already reduced federal funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs.
Like legislation passed by other states, the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act requires insurers to cover all PrEP drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Studies have shown that PrEP drugs, which can be taken as pills or by injection just twice a year, are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.
“I think this is a win for our community,” Parker said after the D.C. Council voted unanimously to approve the bill on its first vote on the measure in February. “And this is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
District of Columbia
Blade editor to be inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
Kevin Naff marks 24 years with publication this year
Longtime Washington Blade Editor Kevin Naff will be inducted into D.C.’s Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame in June, the group announced this week.
Hall of Fame honorees are chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter. Naff and two other inductees — Seth Borenstein, a Washington-based national science writer for the AP and Cheryl W. Thompson, an award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio — will be celebrated at the chapter’s Dateline Awards dinner on Tuesday, June 9, at the National Press Club. The dinner’s emcee will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU radio’s weekly “Politics Hour.”
“I am tremendously honored by this recognition,” Naff said. “I have spent a lifetime in the D.C. area learning from so many talented journalists and am humbled to be considered in their company. Thank you to SPJ and to all the LGBTQ pioneers who came before me who made this possible.”
Naff joined the Blade in 2002 after years in print and digital journalism. He worked as a financial reporter for Reuters in New York before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to launch the Baltimore Sun’s website. He spent four years at the Sun before leaving for an internet startup and later joining the mobile data group at Verizon Wireless working on the first generation of mobile apps.
He then moved to the Blade and has served as the publication’s longest-tenured editor. In 2023, Naff published his first book, “How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality — And How Our Enemies Could Take It All Away.”
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include luminaries in journalism like Wolf Blitzer, Benjamin Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe. The Blade’s senior news reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. was inducted in 2015.
Maryland
Supreme Court ruling against conversion therapy bans could affect Md. law
Then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed statute in 2018
By PAMELA WOOD, JOHN-JOHN WILLIAMS IV, and MADELEINE O’NEILL | The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids in Colorado, a ruling that also could apply to Maryland’s ban on the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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