I worked with the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GYCA) which is supported and managed fiscally by the Global Youth Action Network. The Global Youth Action Network (GYAN) is a non-profit organization in New York that highlights and rewards young activists around the world and brings them to the forefront at major United Nations-related events. Such activities include crafting a Youth and Millennium Development Goal (MDG) report as well as an MDG Youth Action Guide and providing monetary awards for young people doing exceptional community service work anywhere in the world. GYAN also helps link young people with one another through an online portal known as TakingItGlobal.org. GYAN provides a variety of resources and assistance to young activists in order to get them more involved in decision making processes that affect them.

Although I was physically based in GYAN, my work was on GYCA, an independent initiative I co-founded and have been working on since July 2004. The idea for GYCA came from discussions among youth attendees of the XV International AIDS Conference in Bangkok in July 2004. Many of the youth participants communicated with each other through an online forum before the main conference and spent time with one another at a special youth pre-conference that was organized by Family Health International. Many wished that they knew of each other before the conference and recognized the need for a central ‘body’ to connect them so that existing initiatives can be more empowering for young people working in HIV/AIDS interventions. Considering that over 50% of new HIV infections occur between young people ages 15-24, it is crucial that they are empowered and supported in the work they do to reverse the spread. One young person had an opportunity to speak with the executive director of UNAIDS about the need for such a central body led by young people. He suggested that youth figure out what kind of initiative they needed and UNAIDS would provide technical and financial assistance for it.

Therefore, at the conference, a group of people (me included) came together to form the four pillars of what would be the basis for the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS. These pillars are networking and best practice sharing, capacity building, political advocacy and preparing for the next International AIDS Conference (IAC). After the conference, I worked on developing a framework to start the coalition and have pushed the GYCA to become a reality, inviting GYAN, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and several other major organizations that eventually became stakeholders.

Currently, the coalition is made up of 14 regional focal points all over the world and connects over 700 young people and adult allies who work in HIV/AIDS interventions through an online forum. We produce a bi-monthly newsletter and have begun to create and facilitate e-courses as part of our capacity building initiative. Several of our focal points have conducted research on the progress of their government to commitments made at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS) as they relate to youth. This research was incorporated in a report called ‘Our Voices, Our Future’ which was published by UNFPA and launched at a breakfast during the UNGASS review in New York in June 2005. Some of the writers that contributed to the report were flown in to attend the breakfast – this was indeed a great success for GYCA.

UNAIDS has provided GYCA with an initial grant and, in August, UNFPA provided us with another grant to ensure the sustainability of our work through the next IAC in Toronto in August 2006. We have managed to hire two full-time staff and one part-time person (me) to continue with the work that will help more young people meaningfully attend the next IAC (meaningfully as in presenters of presentations, workshops, and poster presentations, not solely as attendees).

I did several important things this summer for GYCA. I developed a Political Advocacy Strategy for the coalition for the months leading up to the next IAC in Toronto 2006. This strategy has four parts: I. Research Methodology, II Identifying Solutions for youth-government Collaboration, III Implementing Deliverables, IV Assessing Advocacy work. The strategy includes a variety of awareness-raising and action activities for members of GYCA to implement. The core of the strategy is a Political Advocacy course that focuses on holding governments accountable to commitments made in the UNGASS Declaration of Commitments. The course is offered in September and will be facilitated again in December on a bi-monthly basis after that. I have also developed materials for the course. The 5-week course is for 20 participants and is based on the above-mentioned four parts. The main idea of the course is for participants to learn how to create and implement an advocacy campaign and actually implement the campaign after the course with assistance of GYCA staff. I used materials from a variety of sources to put this course together, including from Oxfam International Youth Parliament, Advocates for Youth, and an ‘Advocacy in Action’ Toolkit made by the International Council of AIDS Service Organizations. It was quite laborious but definitely a good research experience.

Additionally, during the month of August, I facilitated an e-course on Project Management for GYCA members. Materials for this course were created by Oxfam International Youth Parliament and I adapted them to fit better into the HIV/AIDS. At this point, the course has ended, and we are developing and distributing certificates for those who have successfully completed the course. Out of 16 active participants who took the course, about nine of them have fully completed it. The course consisted of mandatory weekly exercises and forum discussions. By the end of the course, participants drafted a full project plan.

The Project Management e-course facilitation and Political Advocacy work was the bulk of what I did. However, I also assisted in drafting a GYCA funding proposal for UNFPA, which, as mentioned above, was approved even though we acquired a bit less than we asked. I also assisted with supervising a GYCA intern in GYAN (who is now hired as full time staff). Since she was new to GYCA at the beginning of the summer, I helped her understand how GYCA works and helped guide her work which included creating the newsletter, leading bi-weekly chats with regional focal points (a task that I used to do) and create a work plan for GYCA for the months leading up to Toronto.

Because GYCA is very new, it has been vital to work with as many key stakeholders as we can. It is, after all, a coalition. To that end, one of the most memorable moments during the summer was a meeting that my colleague and I had with a Project Officer in the Adolescent and Youth Development division of UNICEF. Previously, that person had been skeptical about GYCA because he pointed out that there are a number of different youth-led initiatives that we might duplicate. At the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, UNICEF’s activities were very isolated from all the other youth activities due to the lack of coordination between UNICEF and the youth organizers at Bangkok. Recently, however, we have shared the new funding proposal for UNFPA with UNICEF and have received a surprisingly warm response from the agency. At this meeting, we were assured that we would not only get funding but that GYCA is in the division’s work plan and that the Project Officer would help be sure that everyone there knew about us. He offered several opportunities for collaboration and voiced the need for

UNICEF to be more collaborative in preparing increased youth participation at the next IAC in Toronto. He emphasized the need for UN agencies to lessen their tokenistic approach to youth participation; rather than have each agency always advocate for ‘their’ youth to attend important meetings and have access to opportunities, the UN should embrace an initiative such as GYCA which is independent and inclusive of hundreds of young people from around the world who are very active in their communities but are not necessarily involved with a UN-related youth branch.

Due to this recognition, we were told to be sure that our regional focal point in West Africa submits a list of youth attendees who are GYCA members and who plan to attend the International Conference on STDs and AIDS in Africa (ICASA) in December. This list will be submitted to the UNICEF country office in Nigeria and will be used to invite the young people to a roundtable that UNICEF will be holding at the pre-conference before ICASA. At this roundtable, participants will select one young person to speak at the opening plenary session of the main conference. We were consulted on this and asked for our support in mobilizing West African and other African youth who are in the coalition in order to include them in UNICEF’s activities at ICASA and provide them the opportunity to speak at the roundtable as well as at the opening plenary. This was a very inspiring meeting for us because it was a true example of youth-adult collaboration. The Project Officer plans to send us the concept paper for the roundtable at ICASA, and he also expressed interest in the advocacy work that we are doing.

Ultimately, there was a real feeling of cooperation and hope in moving forward. It is often easy to be frustrated when dealing with the UN because it tends to be very bureaucratic and skeptical of such efforts. We have been extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work so closely with UN agencies and continue to generate support from them while maintaining independence. UNICEF’s support provides us with further credibility and an impetus to keep going with our work. It was a real victory.

Currently, I am balancing work for my senior year and part-time work for GYCA. I will continue to facilitate the Political Advocacy e-course and will work on developing an e-course on grant proposal writing and fundraising. I will also provide assistance to other GYCA staff in preparing the Toronto Youth Force, particularly in developing an initiative to get more young people to apply to the conference as abstract presenters.