PAVE Alliance Consulting LLC builds capacity at the intersection of lived experience and public health. Our work includes continuing education for peer specialists, personal and professional development for people rebuilding their lives, and training packages for new and experienced educators, trainers, and entrepreneurs who are launching programs of their own. We also partner with agencies and organizations that want to grow their community footprint, solve real recruitment and retention challenges, and strengthen the pipeline of peer leadership from within. Continuing education is one important part of this larger picture. Every toolkit, training, and consultation is grounded in lived experience, public health practice, and the day-to-day realities of community-based service delivery.
Founders
Co-Founder
Denise Drayton
National HIV/AIDS advocate and specialist in prevention work with older adults
Denise Drayton has spent more than 30 years turning her own experience as a long-term HIV survivor into work that lifts other people up. Her path has taken her through ACRIA and GMHC as a Peer Educator, and Senior Planet, building digital literacy skills with older adults, and Ribbon, a national center of excellence for HIV and aging, work she still carries forward today as Senior Program Manager at The Reunion Project.
The chapter that shaped PAVE Alliance most happened years earlier, at Exponents in New York City. Denise co-developed the PWA Leadership Training Institute there, then became Director of Education and Prevention for ARRIVE, the peer-led health education and recovery program built to turn people with lived experience into credentialed educators. It is the same blueprint she and Victor now bring to every organization PAVE partners with.
Co-Founder
Victor Velazquez
Senior Healthcare Operations Leader and Board Director
Victor Velazquez spent more than 20 years in executive nonprofit leadership, most of it at Exponents, Inc., a leading harm reduction and recovery organization in New York City. As Director of Training and Recruitment, he led recruitment and staff training across the entire agency, managed multi-million dollar public health contracts, and helped build training programs that graduated more than 11,000 people. He led that agency-wide work, including the ARRIVE program, for eight more years, until his own retirement in October 2022.
Victor is a 30 plus year HIV survivor and a person in long-term recovery. His path moved from incarceration to the boardroom, and this year he brings that story to USCHA's national stage with an accredited continuing education session titled From Prison to the Boardroom.
He is a CCAR Recovery Coach Trainer, a Certified Peer Support Specialist Trainee (CPSS-T), and a Mental Health First Aider. Victor built PAVE Alliance to give other organizations the same operational tools that helped peer leadership grow into something that changed thousands of lives, so it stops being treated like a risk and starts being treated like the asset it is.
Our ARRIVE legacy
Where ARRIVE came from
ARRIVE started in 1988 as a federally funded pilot program, one of the first in the country built to teach HIV prevention to people leaving prison with a history of drug use. Howard Josepher helped design it, and he knew the work from the inside. Heroin had taken over his own life years earlier, and it cost him arrests, jail time, and more than a dozen trips through detox before he found his way into recovery.
He spent the decades that followed building programs that treated addiction as something people could recover from with support, not something that made them less than everyone else. When the original ARRIVE study ended, Howard co-founded Exponents, Inc. with his wife, Maria Sam Josepher, and Joseph Turner, so the program could keep running as a full nonprofit. He served as Exponents' President and CEO until 2018 and passed away in April 2025. The program he started went on to train and graduate more than 10,000 people. Denise Drayton and Victor Velazquez would each go on to help lead it.
Watch: Howard Josepher, Mastering the Beast
Two paths, one program
Denise Drayton served as Director of Education and Prevention for ARRIVE, the peer-led health education and recovery training program at Exponents.
Victor's own path to peer leadership started earlier, and from the inside. While incarcerated, he became part of the PACE Program, Prisoners for AIDS Counseling and Education, a peer-led HIV education group founded in 1989 by incarcerated men at Eastern Correctional Facility, modeled on a program incarcerated women had built earlier at Bedford Hills. Victor served as PACE's Assistant Director before his release.
In February 2008, Victor joined Exponents as a Trainer, fresh out of incarceration and already carrying real leadership experience from PACE. Denise did not just supervise him. She mentored him step by step over the next six years: from Trainer to Senior Trainer, Senior Trainer to Assistant Director, and Assistant Director to Director of Training and Recruitment, a role that put him in charge of recruitment and training across all of Exponents, not just ARRIVE.
When Denise retired in 2014, Victor stepped into that same Director role and kept building. Under his leadership, ARRIVE grew into a $2.5 million contract and held a 75 percent participant completion rate, proof that a program built on peer leadership can perform at the highest level. Victor led the program for eight more years, until his own retirement from Exponents and ARRIVE in October 2022.
That history is the working model behind every partnership PAVE Alliance builds today. Peer leadership, developed deliberately over time, is not a risk. It is a foundation that produces real results, for the people in the program and the organizations that run it.
Our mission and vision
Mission
To empower individuals, community-based organizations, nonprofits, and their staff, consultants, and peers by providing innovative, inclusive, and impactful training solutions that drive community advocacy, deepen community engagement, strengthen network building, amplify voices, and inspire collective action toward social justice, public health, and human rights.
Vision
To become the leading force in advancing social justice by empowering grassroots efforts and building communities of change, creating a world where equity and empowerment are at the core of every community.
What PAVE means
PAVE stands for Partnership for Advocacy, Vision, and Empowerment. This is our mission acronym. It is distinct from the P.A.V.E. product framework below (Prepare, Advance, Validate, Empower), which shapes how we build every curriculum.
The P.A.V.E. framework
01
P Prepare
Ground every learner in context, evidence, and readiness.
02
A Advance
Move skills forward with practice, not just information.
03
V Validate
Confirm competency with post-tests and documentation.
04
E Empower
Return authority to the people doing the work.
The MIPA principle
MIPA stands for the Meaningful Involvement of People living with HIV/AIDS. In practice it means people with lived experience help shape every program we build, not just receive it.
