January update - networking

Resilience has been a major theme in our provision of late, as has reducing isolation. This is especially important for our clients whose family are far away from home, or who have experienced family breakdown or bereavement.

We’ve also started to support a couple of exciting ventures - mostly by building referral pathways between projects - but also with some potential partnership working on the horizon. One of these is the Positively Ageing Forum (PAF), the other is Age UK’s Opening Doors project.

The Positively Ageing Forum is an initiative put together by individuals from across the community who consider themselves to be ageing with HIV. It is also a member of Age UK’s Speaking Up For Our Age network, a national network of independent forums.

We were very fortunate to meet with PAF early on in the project and we even have one of their members on our Advisory Group. We’ve enjoyed a tremendous amount of support from them for which we’re very grateful. Find out more about PAF.

Opening Doors has been running a social group for older gay and bisexual men living with HIV called OGP, and we’ve been thrilled to have somewhere to refer clients who are specifically interested in socialising and talking with peers about issues that affect them. I personally think that the group is a great example of how ‘mainstream’ services can come up with innovative ways to support minority populations and work with people in an empowering way and on their own terms. I hope to see more groups like OGP start up from mainstream organisations in the future. For those interested, this group meets on the first Thursday of every month at:

Tavis House
1-6 Tavistock Square
London
WC1H 9NA

We were also very fortunate to be included in an HIV and Ageing seminar organised Terrence Higgins Trust’s Policy Director, Lisa Power, who is also the Chair of our Advisory Group. This brought a diverse range of health and social care professionals together, as well as people living with HIV. It was great to hear about some exciting research from the States and Canada, and to share ideas with others about the future of the sector and how health and social care organisations will cope with the ‘greying’ of HIV.

In terms of our service provision, we’ve worked with 43 clients spread pretty evenly across the three main areas (mentoring, groupwork and advice) since the end of December. We’ve had clients from 17 London boroughs. We’ve also had about 10 new referrals in the last two weeks alone, so are off to a very busy start to 2013! We’ve recently held mentoring training and have another weekend of training coming up at the end of the month, which should boost our volunteer numbers to somewhere close to the 20 mark.

We have a new Positively Ageing group for anyone gay, bisexual or MSM (men who have sex with men) who is over 50 and HIV positive. It starts on 7 February and runs for six weeks. If you haven’t already signed up, but would like to do so please email: healthwealthandhappiness@tht.org.uk or call: 020 7812 1615.