1001 AIDS Stories now on-line
Provoking media and public dialogue on critical global challenges
1001 AIDS Stories is a new Panos Canada website – a mosaic of words and images, building into a living inventory of HIV-related experiences.
Each personal narrative comes from someone whose life has been affected by HIV/AIDS.
The first project of the Vancouver Initiative, 1001 AIDS Stories is an exciting, dynamic and inclusive platform for people to communicate about AIDS through storytelling, pictures and comments. It will link to online social networks, engage diverse cultures and communities, be a portal for HIV information and ideas, and act as a hub for AIDS advocacy and support.
Our aim is to build a deeper, more nuanced understanding of AIDS today. This isn’t the impersonal analysis of experts, but is growing organically from deeply-felt personal insights.
The first authors include Vancouver artist Tiko Kerr and Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes, plus tales from Romania, Catalonia and South Africa. And why a lawyer was eating out of a dumpster.
Panos Canada is part of the global Panos Network: eight autonomous institutes in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe. The Network has a strong focus on the economically and socially disadvantaged.
Individual Panos institutes have programmes on children & youth, climate, energy, environment & natural resources, food security, gender, globalisation, health, HIV-AIDS, human security, ICTs, migration, media pluralism, and pastoralism.
We work especially closely with Panos Caribbean, head-quartered in Haiti, and with Panos GAP, the Network's Global AIDS Programme.
Panos Canada's current focus is on HIV-AIDS. But our innovative methodologies, including the commonalities lens (see below), have implications in many other sectors. We plan to start a second major thematic programme soon.
" Cities are HIV/AIDS crucibles. They suffer the most intense impacts, and they create the most innovative responses. "
Vancouver has outstanding AIDS expertise — in civil society, treatment, research and policy development. But these resources are insufficiently used internationally.
The Vancouver Initiative (VI) seeks to change this. We hope to help create a strengthened Vancouver AIDS community, with more deeply-rooted global ties, and with a reinforced social justice image. A city which offers the world innovation in AIDS, making the global struggle more exciting — and therefore more effective.
The three principals of VI, which is a Panos Canada project, are William Booth, former ED of AIDS Vancouver, Jon Tinker, ED of Panos Canada, and Pieter de Vos, public health and inner cities specialist.
The Vancouver Initiative for AIDS Innovation
Panos Canada Welcomes New Director
Amir Moghadasi CA, a senior associate with international accountants Grant Thornton, has been appointed as director and treasurer of Panos Canada and of the Panos Foundation. Amir replaces Sandeep Manak CA, who has retired after over five years with Panos. Panos is deeply grateful to Sandeep for his long service.
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Commonalities lens
"The North-South lens is blurred, cracked and warped. at 50 years old, it's long past its sell-by date."
Panos Canada's work is based on the "commonalities lens", a concept we have been developing over the last few years. Instead of focusing on differences between countries and cultures, the commonalities lens homes in on what we share, creating solidarity and the space to learn from one another as equals.
Read more in Drum Beat, Reuters AlertNet and the University of Sussex.
“We tested out the commnalities lens through a ground-breaking visit of Haitian NGO AIDS practitioners to Vancouver. The results were spectacular.” Read more.
The Haiti Exchange
In November 2008 Panos Canada, in collaboration with Panos Caribbean and the Panos Global AIDS Programme (GAP), hosted a ground-breaking visit of 10 Haitian AIDS experts to Vancouver.
Haitian team members visited Vancouver AIDS organisations to explore commonalities between the situation of HIV/AIDS in both cities. In five days, the team took part in a series of meetings with 20 Vancouver AIDS organisations, culminating in a community dialogue at SFU on World AIDS Day. Click here to read the summary report.
AIDS in Two Cities
In 2006, Panos Canada produced 15 matched pairs of photos by Pieter de Vos showing the impacts of HIV/AIDS, and community responses to the epidemic, in Port au Prince, Haiti, and Vancouver, Canada.
In one of the richest cities in the world, and in one of the poorest, the face of HIV/AIDS is remarkably similar.
Panos Canada welcomes your help. Please consider making a donation, volunteering, or
plural • innovative • research-based • Canadian
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Panos Canada
Institut Panos du Canada / Panos Institute of Canada
