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Affirm Facilitation Associates

Facilitation Associates responding to HIV

Affirm is an association of people that work together to strengthen local capacity for response to HIV and AIDS.

Linked by a shared vision, Affirm have partnered with InterHealth and Community Health Global Network (CHGN) to get actively involved in stimulating global health using common key strengths and shared experience.

Affirm associates work together to expand the understanding and practice of Human Capacity for Response(HCR) in communities and organisations, with the vision that local communities can make decisions, care, act together and change themselves, infuencing capacity to;

1. Respond

More communities get involved, by acting for care and change, self measuring, and transferring their sense of optimism to other communities

2. Transform

Health workers become motivated by experiential locally based learning, and connect with each other for learning from the expanding local response

3. Adapt

Systems & services can change because policy and practice is informed by the local response and supports it as the driving force for sustained action and hope.

A facilitation team approach enables this to happen. Facilitation of HCR enhances HIV related care, prevention and action by communities. It also increases their ability to respond to other critical issues.

This is in contrast to what is often a more dominant focus on being 'intervened at', or receiving provision.

Unlike an interventionist approach, the role of the facilitation team is to accompany and mentor local implementers who act with communities in reflecting on their own capacity and their ability to change their own lives and circumstances. With this in mind, Affirm aim to be a 'family' of facilitators of human capacity development for response, who are willing to commit to taking part, regularly, in shared facilitation team experience.

InterHealth, Affirm and CHGN have the same goal and adopt complementary and often similar ways of working to stimulate responses in local people to feel that they are able to recongnise their own human strengths. Together we are able to combine the following experience, knowledge, and complementary strands of practiceclinical experience in travel and global health facilitation of face to face approaches for expanded community and institutional response networking for community health

The growing concern for ‘emerging economy countries’

• Local healthcare workers and communities are often dispirited and made to expect welfare, because of many project initiatives coming into their countries from ‘outside’ often without consultation or respect for local ownership
• Unintentionally short-sighted and short term project driven approaches lack long term strategic vision, direction, and cross linkage
• Community strength for response and participation is not nurtured adequately
• There is lack of access to adequate healthcare sytems and services

Vision & Hope

Through the facilitation of HCR, hope is activated in communities allowing them to lead from the inside and this optimism is then transferred from community to community.

If health leaders and institutional leaders can learn from these experiences, they become functional, more motivated and more strategic and therefore stronger. Health and religious workers and health systems will adapt and;

• Be linked together as relational communities
• Be able to care independent of externally driven project imperatives and initiatives
• Decide their own change

Based in the UK, Affirm welcomes Associates who act as part of a facilitation team, and also welcomes affiliates, who share the vision but cannot actively participate in the development of this work.

Please email [email protected] for information.

AFFIRM website