As AIDS Awareness Week begins and with World AIDS Day coming up on Monday, December 1, people and organizations across the country are talking about HIV at home and abroad. This week, one of the questions we’ll be asked most frequently at CATIE is: “What does HIV look like in Canada today?”
Recently I was asked to speak at an event organized by Alex McClelland and Nicole Greenspan called “Where Do We Go From Here? AIDS Organizing, Services, Bureaucracy & the State.” The event aimed to address a number of questions, including: What are the limits of current community-based practice based on engagement with the state? Are today’s AIDS service organizations (ASOs) adequately resourced and designed to undertake their intended role? Is the role sufficient to address the ongoing and emerging HIV issues that marginalized communities face? Due to state constraints, what are the consequences on advocacy possibilities for ASOs, or ASO...
While at AIDS 2014, CATIE’s Ed Jackson and I met with a number of Australian agencies to pursue a plan to share best practices around gay men’s sexual health programming. I was already familiar with some of Australia’s powerful awareness, prevention and testing campaigns, but a closer look at the Aussie HIV response has been eye-opening and provides many useful learnings for Canada.
While much of the media attention this summer focused on the International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, a smaller pre-conference held in Sydney brought together Indigenous HIV activists and allies from around the world to discuss the issues facing our peoples.
Welcome to CATIE’s first blog post. Launching what we hope will be an invigorating forum for discussion, it is fitting in this first post to focus on a major recent event in our movement – AIDS 2014, recently held in Melbourne, Australia.
