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HIVAN and Communities: An Overview
HIVAN Team
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HIVAN?’s core mission: HIVAN is essentially about facilitating multisectoral partnerships around HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal. Its fundamental aim is to bring together researchers, policy-makers, interventionists, service-providers and communities into meaningful and mutually rewarding alliances, aimed at addressing the multiple problems heralded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
HIVAN facilitates partnership-building around HIV/AIDS. This is the essence of the service it provides ?– to communities, researchers, service providers and anyone who is committed to working in tandem with others to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
HIVAN and communities
In line with this mission, HIVAN serves as a mechanism for linking communities and community-based organisations with other organisations and individuals who can partner these communities in various ways (research, intervention, training, fund-raising, etc.) to effect meaningful responses to HIV/AIDS. It also provides a means of linking like-minded, and often isolated, community-based HIV/AIDS initiatives with one another.
HIVAN attempts to effect this in a number of ways ?– through development of a comprehensive database of individuals, organisations, projects and literature around HIV/AIDS (web-based, hard copy and isiZulu versions); through regular workshops and annual symposia bringing together different communities and CBOs for the purposes of linking them with one another and developing a unified HIV/AIDS agenda; through a combined university/community seminar series; and through student community-based learning initiatives.
HIVAN also offers a Job Shadow Programme specifically for staff of HIV/AIDS-related civil society organisations. The programme sponsors visits by KZN-based NGO and CBO staff to similar organisations elsewhere in Africa (and vice versa), and in so doing attempts to facilitate exchanges of experience and expertise.
Activities of the Community Liaison Team
The HIVAN Community Liaison Team consists of two full-time staff members, Cedric Mhlongo and Moses Ndlovu. HIVAN is working in partnership with the KwaZulu-Natal CBO Network and, in particular, with its Behaviour Change Programme (BCP) which is directed at implementing a wide-sweeping programme on behaviour change in communities. The BCP has representation throughout the province?’s eight regions and facilitates HIVAN?’s entry into the communities with which it engages. For the present, the work to be done in communities consists primarily of a series of community workshops aimed, first, at identifying HIV/AIDS-related activities, assets, needs and priorities in communities; second, at familiarising communities with HIVAN and the resources and services it has to offer; and third, and most importantly, obtaining information that can be used to identify organisations and individuals who can appropriately partner these communities in ways that meet community-identified priorities in relation to HIV/AIDS.
It is worth noting that HIVAN places particular emphasis on identifying, profiling and foregrounding the activities of grassroots-level HIV/AIDS-related initiatives. Many ?‘formal?’ organisations and projects are already listed in various directories, but there are numerous smaller, ?‘informal?’, less publicised initiatives operating on the ground. The Community Liaison Team will play a key role in identifying these community-based initiatives. Indeed, this is one of the primary objectives of the community/area audit process. |
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KZN - Durban Metro Council (Durban, Phoenix, Umlazi, Pinetown etc)
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