Comforted Creatures Video

posted: 14/04/2011

We produced this animation (with apologies to Ardman Animation’s Creature Comforts) as a serious but amusing presentation on some of our work, for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. You can view it on the new videos page of the HIV magazine Baseline.

We interviewed people with HIV who have benefited from our positive prevention work and residential weekends, funded by the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
 

Excellent Presentation

After presenting all our Positive Prevention work which they have funded, to the Foundation's panel, they told us:

"George House Trust were the first to present and I have to say set a standard that was not replicated. If there was ever a lesson on how to do an interesting presentation, that was it.

Lynda and Colin spoke with passion about the work, the achievements so far and the publication of initial outcomes (they had the BHIVA/NHIVNA poster displayed).

An individual talked very openly and honestly about how he had benefited from the programme and to top it all we were treated to an animated film with people’s real experiences of the support and help they had received.

A perfect presentation with something for everyone - excellent!"

CHAPS impressed

We also showed this at the recent CHAPS conference held in Manchester for organisations and people involved in HIV prevention work with men who have sex with men. Robbie Currie, a leading NHS HIV prevention commissioner in London was very impressed, asking number of questions and commenting how useful a resource it was, and his interested in having something similar.  

View Comforted Creatures here http://www.baseline-hiv.co.uk/latest-videos

Comforted Creatures with HIV

posted: 04/11/2010

We produced this animation (with apologies to Ardman Animation’s Creature Comforts) as a serious but amusing presentation on some of our work, for the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

We interviewed people with HIV who have benefited from our positive prevention work and residential weekends, funded by the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
 

Excellent Presentation

After presenting all our work to the Foundation's panel, they told us:

George House Trust were the first to present and I have to say set a standard that was not replicated. If there was ever a lesson on how to do an interesting presentation, that was it.

Lynda and Colin spoke with passion about the work, the achievements so far and the publication of initial outcomes (they had the BHIVA/NHIVNA poster displayed).

An individual talked very openly and honestly about how he had benefited from the programme and to top it all we were treated to an animated film with people’s real experiences of the support and help they had received.

A perfect presentation with something for everyone - excellent! 

Watch and listen at George House Trust on Facebook

Living Proof Weekends 2010

posted: 20/01/2010

Living Proof Weekends are run by National Long Term Survivors Group (nltsg), for people who have been diagnosed with HIV for at least five years. The weekends normally cost £170 but some free places are available – for anyone living in the Stockport Council area, and the Elton John Aids Foundation helps other people on low incomes. Other Councils may also be willing to fund places from their AIDS Support Grant budget.
 

NLTSG organises four “Living Proof” weekend retreats each year in rural Staffordshire – which is around 50 miles south of Manchester.

The weekends provide a safe environment for people to come together to benefit from peer support, share experiences and discuss issues that are affecting them. There are discussions and workshops which people at the weekends decide what to discuss, and these are then facilitated by professionals.
Complementary therapists offer a wide range of treatments throughout the weekend and usually one of the facilitators is a trained counsellor. All activities are optional.
 

The weekends run from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, with members arriving from 3.30pm on Friday. They expect everyone to be present by 5:45pm for the opening circle.
 

Living Proof Weekends in 2010

• 26 – 28 March
• 9 – 11 July
• 24 – 26 September
• 17 – 19 December

Download the details here
 

Elton John funding details here
 

Stockport residents: for attendance fee and travel costs all you need to do is contact the service - client contact number 0161 474 3636
 

Commonwealth Stops HIV Funding

posted: 30/11/2009

The Commonwealth Foundation agreed to switch almost all of its entire £400,000 HIV funding from HIV to cultural activities, without consultation, in April, it has just emerged.
 

The leaders of Commonwealth countries, ending their annual meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, were last night facing dealing with the scandal. The Commonwealth has 30 per cent of the world's population but 60 per cent of the people with HIV in the world, and HIV is acknowledged as a "Commonwealth emergency". Despite this, and without public consultation, it was decided to end the only Commonwealth programme that directly tackles HIV.
 

Commonwealth HIV Network abandoned
Over the past four years, nearly £400,000 has been spent through the Commonwealth Foundation to create an international network of experts, activists and civic organisations working on HIV/AIDS. The Foundation, funded by taxpayers of the 53 member states of the Commonwealth, decided in April to switch the money from the Pan-Commonwealth HIV/AIDS Network to cultural activities. It did not tell those involved, according to confidential emails seen by The Independent.
 

A storm of protest followed behind closed doors in which the foundation was accused of "jumping ship" and its director, Mark Collins, was asked to explain the "abandonment". In an email exchange with Mr Collins in April, the Canadian scientist John W Foster, of the North-South Institute in Ottawa, wrote to express his "deep surprise and concern regarding the news that HIV/AIDS is no longer a priority of the ... foundation". Mr Foster asked for the decision to be reversed and demanded to know the rationale behind it.
 

Denial
The foundation's response to the furore was to deny any change in strategy. Mr Collins insisted yesterday that the network's funding had reached the end of a "three-year commitment". He has told the foundation's partners they can apply individually for small grants through a website. But one of the founding members of the network, Dr Robert Carr, of the International Council of Aids Service Organisations, rejected this explanation as nonsensical.
 

"When we enquired about next year's funding we were told there was to be no funding," he said.
They came to us and persuaded us to start a civil society network and then unilaterally decided they couldn't be bothered with it." Dr Carr said it made "no strategic sense" to spend time and money building up a network and then closing it down "without asking what happened and what did it achieve?". The network, designed to share expertise, lobby governments, set up education schemes and strengthen civil society has been credited with shaping national strategic plans on HIV in at least two countries.
 

Silencing the HIV programme manager
In September, confusion over the goings-on at the foundation deepened when Mr Collins abruptly suspended his own programme manager, Anisha Rajapakse, without explanation. Ms Rajapakse, who previously worked for the UN and the German government, is thought to have objected to moves to downgrade the importance of AIDS work. Attempts to contact her were unsuccessful. The foundation refused The Independent's request to speak to her and would not discuss the grounds for her suspension, insisting yesterday that the matter was "internal and confidential".
 

Simply asking why?  means cancelled invites

When members of the AIDS network, all of them recruited by Ms Rajapakse, demanded to know why she had been "silenced", several of them, including Dr Carr, were "dis-invited" from the Commonwealth People's Forum – the main civil society event in the build-up to this week's summit of Commonwealth heads of government. Lisa Williams-Lahari, an HIV and gender activist from the Pacific region, was originally invited to Trinidad by the foundation but found herself "dis-invited". The justification given was that that the forum was oversubscribed, yet the next day someone else from the same Pacific network was invited to register. "I went from an invitation, my name on a programme and preparing for my sessions in September to a wall of silence six weeks long," said Ms Lahari. "To date no one at the foundation has withdrawn their invite. They simply pretend it never happened."
 

Colonial arrogance detected in cuts and silence
James Onyango from Kenya's Aids Intervention and Prevention Project Group, said it was a scandal that members who should be working to save lives were wasting time trying to find out what was going on. "Colonialism came to an end and this arrogance shouldn't be there," he said. "The foundation is meant to work with the people to bring change."
 

Mr Collins denied any strategic shift on the Commonwealth's HIV and AIDS policy and said a meeting had been held by the forum this week. "There is no intention to lower the priority of HIV and AIDS in our programme. HIV and AIDS remains high on the list of concerns," he said in a statement from Trinidad.  

Shambolic meeting

Dr Carr, who attended the meeting, described it as "a shambles". Others, speaking anonymously after the session, said it had been "incoherent" and "inconsequential".
 

The Commonwealth and HIV

• The Commonwealth has 53 member countries
• 30 per cent of the world's population, but 60 per cent of its HIV-infected people
• 24 million HIV-positive people live in the Commonwealth
• The Commonwealth Foundation invested £387,700 to create a HIV network. Members were told to reapply to a separate fund that last year issued just £37,772.
• The Caribbean has the second-highest prevalence of HIV of any region in the world
• The pandemic is the leading cause of death among Caribbean people between 15-42
• There are 430,000 people living with HIV in the Caribbean
• In NW England 32 people were infected in the Caribbean (almost all these infections took place in Jamaica) and there are 75 people with a Caribbean ethnic background diagnosed with HIV in NW England.

Source