SLF home > july 2007 grassroots > letter from Stephen

dear friends:

The evolution of the Foundation continues to be fascinating.
As you can see from much of this Newsletter, the grandmothers initiative has picked up extraordinary momentum and is now happily consuming a great deal of the Foundation’s time.

But there’s more to it than that. We learned an important lesson from the grandmother experience. We learned that even a small Foundation can discover a new dimension of the pandemic, largely neglected by the rest of the world, and by the sheer force of activity and determination, turn that new aspect of the pandemic into an international ‘cause celebre’.

Who would have believed, even one year ago, that African grandmothers would rise to the top of the AIDS agenda?!

Now we’re out of control, intoxicated by what we’ve achieved, and looking for the next world to conquer. I’ve been chatting with Ilana and colleagues at the Foundation, and it’s our growing view that what we should tackle next is the issue of “Youth”, ages 15 to 24. This age group in Africa constitutes 50% of the new infections, huge numbers of deaths, with young girls especially vulnerable, and yet youth are the nearly invisible part of the AIDS response.

Everybody talks about youth (just as so many talked about grandmothers), but the response to their desperate predicament is negligible. The Foundation is beginning to imagine the possibilities of Canadian High Schools and Community Colleges and Universities banding together to support the resilient and struggling youth of Africa, just as has been the case with the indomitable grandmothers. It won’t happen immediately of course, nor tomorrow, but perhaps at some point down the road.

So stay tuned for a Youth to Youth campaign. We’ll probably start with an international conference!

Best personal regards,

Stephen Lewis

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