As a UK-based HIV, health and rights advocacy network we’ve been working since 1986 to support UK and global movements in challenging inequalities and systemic barriers to health.
Our vision is a world without AIDS, where all people can realise their right to good health and wellbeing. In four years (2022-2025), STOPAIDS seeks to secure key steps towards transforming funding, power and systems, particularly for people living with and affected by HIV and marginalised (key and vulnerable) populations through three interdependent advocacy impact areas:
1. Placing People Over Profit: Ensuring equal access to medicines, strengthening people’s rights regarding digital health technologies, and defining the private sector’s role in global health.
2. Delivering Quality of Life for people living with and affected by HIV: by ensuring funding for quality HIV services and community responses; by integrating HIV and rights into broader health; and by addressing barriers beyond health, like criminalisation of most affected populations, that prevent us from ending AIDS.
3. Seeking to transform aid, solidarity and development co-operation. This means moving away from outdates structures and practices of international aid that concentrates power in the hands of the few, and towards an approach that is build on meaningful involvement of all stakeholders, particularly affected communities and civil society.
Our work is delivered through strategic convening and mobilising, hosting, systemic analysis and influencing of decision-makers. The current STOPAIDS strategy runs from 2022-2025. A diagram representing the core components of our strategy can be viewed here.
The whole strategy and work is framed by our living anti-oppression framework which is grounded in four key values of: humility, shifting power, solidarity and co-ownership.
As an organisation based in the UK, we must be mindful of the power and privilege we hold and show humility as we learn and grow towards our anti-oppression goals. We do this by working to shift power to where it’s most needed, ensuring co-ownership of our work – involving, centering, and learning from organisations and individuals who are more marginalised – and acting in solidarity toward shared goals.