[UPDATE] April – June 2012

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AIDS 2012 Comes To Our Backyard 

The largest AIDS conference in the world, brining together over 20,000 individuals, is coming to Washington DC this summer. Asia Catalyst is pleased to award travel scholarships to help four Chinese AIDS activists take part in AIDS 2012, the world’s largest AIDS conference. The four activists – three women and one man — include the mother of a child living with HIV/AIDS, a former sex worker, a rights advocate, and a youth leader. They will speak at the conference, join in roundtable discussions, and share policy recommendations with the UN and international agencies. Together, they represent the next generation of civil society leaders in China’s fight against HIV/AIDS.
In preparation for the International AIDS Conference in Washington D.C. in July, the China team, together with three student volunteers from the International School of Beijing, has been supporting our three Chinese delegates to finalize their presentations, posters, and design brochures about their organizations.

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[COMMENTARY] What We Talk About When We Talk About Outreach

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By Mike Frick 

Many of our partners in China engage in “outreach” to marginalized communities such as sex workers, drug users, or men who have sex with men, that are at increased risk of contracting HIV. We hear a lot about “outreach,” but what do these activities actually look like in practice? China program director Gisa Hartmann and I experienced outreach first-hand when we accompanied Lanlan, a member of Asia Catalyst’s NGO Leadership Cohort, on an afternoon with female sex workers in Tianjin.

Lanlan is the founder and executive director of Tianjin’s Xin’ai Home, a grassroots organization dedicated to promoting the health and rights of female sex workers in Tianjin. Over the course of four hours, Lan Lan showed us two different outreach environments: a bathhouse with about twenty-five sex workers and a street with dozens of hair salons and massage parlors, each staffed by two or three women.

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