Communities lie at the heart of the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, often displaying extraordinary courage, resilience, and strength in addressing this global challenge. The Community Dialogue Space at the ninth International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) will serve to recognize, honor and support outstanding community leadership and action in addressing HIV/AIDS, providing local and regional voices with a global platform. Through acts of community leadership focused on addressing the epidemic, innovative, creative, and sustainable methods of providing care and support to people living with HIV/AIDS are being successfully implemented at the local level, showing us in practical terms how to contain a global epidemic one community at a time.

Because of the sensitivity and complexity of the issues related to HIV/AIDS, discussions, solutions and actions must come from within the everyday interactions of community life. An integral understanding of how local communities approach the HIV/AIDS epidemic, combined with innovative approaches to capacity development at all levels and among a broad spectrum of grantees and partner organizations, has proven critical for achieving successful responses in HIV/AIDS prevention, care, treatment and support. Lessons and experience demonstrate the need to work with communities to help shape and realize national and local policies that can inform global decision-making from the bottom-up.

Increased efforts to link vertically with ongoing global and national efforts, and horizontally between a broad array of stakeholders and partners are therefore essential.

The Space

The Community Dialogue space at ICAAP will be open to all conference attendees and will be created, hosted and anchored by the communities themselves. The space will be dedicated to creating opportunities to highlight stories of grassroots achievements in HIV/AIDS responses and challenges faced by community led action around the world. The space will encourage a dialogue about developing an enabling environment for community participation in tackling HIV/AIDS. At its centre it will have an interactive ‘dialogue space’ to facilitate group discussions, presentations, press conferences and media interaction, while a fully equipped IT centre will be available for all participants. Targeted discussions will focus on key HIV/AIDS prevention, care, treatment and support themes of direct relevance to sustainable development among community representatives from different parts of the world, as well as dialogues between communities and international leaders.

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