Community, Care, Change, and Hope

This case study documents a model for facilitating a strong community response to HIV/AIDS. The Salvation Army Change Program in the Ndola and Choma Districts in Zambia illustrates a facilitation process that stimulates an appropriate local response to HIV/AIDS as an essential component of human capacity development. According to the Synergy Project “Human capacity development means developing the will, skills, capacities and systems for an effective response to HIV.”

"The model builds on local strengths and resources, stimulating ordinary people to address the barriers that prevent them from using HIV/AIDS information and services to prevent new infections, compassionately care for those who are infected, and mitigate the effects of the epidemic on families and the community.

Only by addressing personal risk, stigma, and the potential for personal and societal change will the demand for and use of voluntary counseling and testing, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and antiretroviral therapy services increase. Thus, building human capacity in the community to become “AIDS competent” and respond effectively to HIV/AIDS is an essential intervention alongside the strengthened and expanded health services that are being rolled out with the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria resources."

Topics include:

• The Salvation Army approach to HIV
• The Salvation Army facilitation teams
• Lusaka Change Programme
• Community actions
• Ways of working
• Key concepts in practice
• Community Actions
• Influencing others

Evidence for the success of the facilitation process in Zambia includes:

• Establishment of community gardens to provide food and some income from the sale of surplus food to orphans in 17 communities in one area
• Demand from community members for voluntary counseling and testing, resulting in testing of 85 people in one community and requests that testing be provided in several nearby communities
• Increase in the numbers of people reached in home-care programmes and in the quality of support provided to them
• Increase in the numbers of communities organising themselves to respond actively to HIV
• Change in risky activities - the local cultural practice of sexual cleansing of widows replaced by alternative rites that do not increase transmission of HIV, and sharp personal implements such as razors no longer being shared