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The Need
Project Overview
What We Do
The Impact So Far
Lessons Learned
Our Stories

Caitlin Chandler, Director
HIV Young Leaders Fund

Hi, my name is Caitlin Chandler, and I am Director of the HIV Young Leaders Fund. Our mission is to enable new leadership in the HIV response among young people most affected by HIV. We’re committed to ensuring that young people are at the centre of the HIV response, and therefore fully involved in the policies and programmes that affect them.

The Fund supports organisations of people ages 30 years and younger seeking to make a difference in HIV and AIDS who are often excluded from or unreached by existing programmes, such as young sex workers, young men who have sex with men (MSM), young people who use injection drugs and young people living with HIV.

Today I’m pleased to take you on a tour of our small grants programme in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, which is designed to invest in young leaders and their coalitions in this region, while at the same time raising the visibility of their work and strengthening the sustainability of their initiatives.

The Need

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English Transcript

"I think it’s critical at this point in our HIV response that youth-led organistions and young people are mobilised to demand access to prevention, treatment, care and support – for now and into the future. Young people are still disproportionately affected by HIV. They account for 40 percent of new HIV infections worldwide and there are also 5.2 million young people living with HIV.

Young people best know their needs and can respond to these needs in innovative and effective ways, but they need funding to do so, and providing an initiative led by young people most affected by HIV with a small grant empowers them to address the needs of their peers.

As they manage and implement a small grant, young people grow as leaders and they become more visible in their community’s HIV response. Then these young people can take their insights and knowledge about what works to other NGOs, policy makers and their government to demand access."

- Caitlin Chandler, HIV Young Leaders Fund

Young people under the age of 25 are disproportionately affected by HIV, comprising 40% of all new infections. What’s more, youth from key affected populations face several unique challenges. Sex workers, people who use drugs, women, and MSM of all ages face extreme difficulties accessing services in various regions across the globe. For young people in these populations the challenge is twofold, because even when there are existing networks and services [for key affected populations], they aren’t always in a position to meet the specific needs of youth. Moreover, similar to other age groups, young individuals in key affected populations face tremendous stigma and discrimination, but they may face even harsher judgement expressly because they are young.

Looking at Southeast Asia and the Pacific, over 95 per cent of new HIV infections among young people in the region are among MSM, sex workers, and people who use drugs – yet the majority of HIV resources in the region go towards prevention programmes targeting all young people.

Like young key affected populations elsewhere in the world, young key populations in this region face distinct challenges and have unique needs. For example, young MSM in the region have inadequate access to testing in treatment facilities and often can’t access services that are open only during the day when they are in school. For young people who use drugs, the age of first injection in Southeast Asia has steadily declined over the years – incarceration further heightens the risk of HIV among this increasingly young population. And, in many countries across the region, all young people must obtain parental consent in order to access HIV services, making it less likely that they will get tested for HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Project Overview

The goal of this programme, which spans from 2011 to 2014, is to catalyse new leadership in the national and regional HIV responses among young key populations and young people living with HIV in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. We’re looking to achieve this by providing small grants to youth-led organisations focused on young people most affected by HIV and ensuring grantees have access to the mentorship tools and resources necessary to succeed – to monitor and evaluate their work and to conduct evidence-informed advocacy.

We’re also working to capture the knowledge and insights of the grantees on how to best reach the most affected young people in the region and to share that information with others involved in the broader HIV response.

What We Do

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English Transcript

"So I think that it’s incredible to see the work that the grantees in the region are doing at the community level, and their ability to work on HIV issues holistically – to really try to tackle some of the division which we’ve seen in the HIV response over the past 30 years. Division between, you know, HIV services and sexual reproductive health services, divisions between services for women and other key affected groups. And what’s really amazing about the grantees is that they’re approaching these issues in a completely integrated way."

- Caitlin Chandler, HIV Young Leaders Fund

The first phase of the project focuses on community networks in six priority countries – Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Our call for proposals resulted in 70 applicants for seven grants – a response which we think demonstrates the commitment and passion of young people in the community. Several steps went into the grant application review process. Let me show you some of them:

One of the first things we did was to form a community review panel comprised of young people from the region with expertise in HIV to review the applications and help determine the final grantees.
Many of the panellists had never before been in a position to allocate resources or make recommendations around funding, so we worked to train them in technical proposal review.
We also held an in-person meeting in Bangkok where the community review panel helped select the final grantees via a group consensus building process.

By placing funding decisions in the hands of young people from Southeast Asia and the Pacific, we made the review process itself an opportunity to build leadership capacity among youth in the region. The process also ensured that young people directly affected by HIV had input into how resources were allocated which, in our opinion, makes for really effective and smart grant making.

The seven round-one grantees were announced in December 2011. In addition to supporting their individual projects, we also continually look for ways to facilitate collaboration and information sharing. Some of the ways that we’ve begun to do this include:

Soon after the grantees were announced, we held a three-day training meeting where they had an opportunity to share their work plans with each other and look at cross-cutting issues in the region.
At the workshop, grantees who work in the same country also collaborated to identify national-level advocacy opportunities.
We have peer mentors who are matched with grantee organisations to provide support. Recognising that there is a language barrier between many of the grantees, one of the peer mentors’ responsibilities is to translate information about the funded project so that it can be shared with other grantees in the region.
We’re also working with the peer mentors to identify grantee projects for case studies, which will assess lessons learned and provide a mechanism for sharing those lessons with other grantees and the broader HIV community.
In addition to supporting information sharing among grantees, we’re working to connect them with other important stakeholders in their country’s HIV response, such as, UNAIDS country offices, other youth networks, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, funding organisations, etcetera.

To read more about each of the seven round-one grantees and their projects, click here.

Two additional rounds of grantees will be selected and announced in 2012 and 2013. All of our funding decisions will continue to be made by a community review panel of young people from the region.

The Impact So Far

Having a three-year partnership with Positive Action has given us a unique opportunity to create a long-term vision and work plan for the young people most affected by HIV in the Southeast Asia and Pacific region. Though we’re less than a year into the partnership at this point, we’ve already seen an impact. For one, we’ve seen that when young people affected by HIV are brought together to make funding decisions, they pick groups that are responding to the real and urgent needs of their peers, and they choose groups that don’t have access to other means of funding. So, for me, the highlight has been to see the power in a truly youth-led and youth-driven movement.

Lessons Learned

One thing we noticed from our call for proposals, which we issued in five different languages of the region, was that many youth-led groups don’t have access to someone who can speak English, and so, they can only apply for funding if applications are in their local language. We really see a need to advocate among other groups in the region to translate funding calls and technical assistance documents so that young people at the grass-roots level can access them.

Another thing we learned is that we can provide something of value even to applicants who are not selected for funding – feedback. One of the things we’re working to do in 2012 and 2013 is to revise the grant application scoring process so that each organisation that applies but does not receive a grant, receives written feedback on why their proposal wasn’t accepted and how they might think about improving it for future funding rounds.

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English Transcript

"I definitely think that the creativity, the energy and the ideas that young people have and the way that they are building organisations and networks to mobilise around HIV is incredibly inspiring. Sometimes when I’m at conferences or events I hear older leaders say, “We really need new leaders to step up you know we can’t do this forever,” and I just want to say, look around – there are young people doing this work, you just may not be aware of it. And I think that often young people do their work and they don’t even seek any kind of recognition for it because they’re just busy doing the day-to-day work of reaching out to their peers, getting them information, getting them services. I think one of the things that’s very inspiring are the different organisations that have mobilised around young people living with HIV and their sexual reproductive health and rights, their rights to have healthy and hot sex lives, their rights to lead normal lives and to be involved in the HIV movement, and I think that continuing to support them is a really, really important thing for all of us to do."

- Caitlin Chandler, HIV Young Leaders Fund

Our Stories

To see videos of some of the round-one grantees discussing, in their own words, their participation in this programme and what the grant has meant to their organisation, click on the titles below:

Youth AIDS Fillipinas Alliance (YAFA)

Youth Speak Out! A youth-led project of SPN+

Pioneer Institute for Social Change

Vietnam Youth Network on HIV

Raks Thai Power Teen Network

Additional videos are coming soon – please continue to check back for updates.

To hear more about HIV Young Leaders Fund from young people around the world, click here.

To learn more about the Positive Action programme, please click here.

Fact File

Project:
Youth-led HIV Initiatives in Southeast Asia and the Pacific

Run by:
HIV Young Leaders Fund, in partnership with Youth LEAD

Region:
Southeast Asia and the Pacific

Population:
Young key affected populations (young sex workers, young men who have sex with men, young people who use injection drugs, etc.) and young people living with HIV

Challenges:
Heightened risk; barriers to prevention, treatment, care and support; stigma and discrimination; limited opportunities for youth and youth-led organisations to directly influence the policies and programmes that affect them

Activities:
Three year grant-giving programme for youth-led organisations focused on young people most affected by HIV; training workshops, peer support and other initiatives to provide grantees with access to mentorship tools and resources

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