Community Education
Multimedia Toolkit
Background For the past 4 years Baylor Black Sea Foundation has
been trying to find the best way to educate and inform
the local community, especially the young people.
One of our most important tasks became developing
a tool which puts together all the experience achieved
throughout the years, the messages and arguments
deemed relevant to provide a realistic image on HIV/
AIDS in Romania. Also it mixes different methods and
instruments that we hope to ensure a higher impact
on the target group thus making it more aware of its
risk behaviors.
Objectives To share Baylor Black Sea Foundation’s approach/
vision on the elements that are crucial in designing an
educational toolkit.
Design/ methods This community education multimedia Toolkit
collects the results of all the observations, notes made
during the community education activities carried
out so far. Also it combines the experience of the
psychosocial department in providing counseling for
the HIV negative partners of our beneficiaries with
the volunteers’ view on HIV. Thus the toolkit has
messages that are clear and documented but in the
same time focused on what is important and relevant
for somebody with few or no information about HIV.
In order to increase its impact it focuses more on
audience participation and involvement and has as
main instrument a video made using photos from the
Picturing Hope project.
Results The Toolkit has yet to be polished and applied but
because it’s a direct result of experience and expertise
in HIV/AIDS field we hope to achieve what we set out
to do: to make people think about HIV/AIDS from a
very personal point of view and to make them challenge
their previous perceptions or ideas about HIV.
Conclusions The Community Education Multimedia Toolkit is
the result of Baylor Black Sea previous experience
in community education on HIV/AIDS in the same
time including the volunteers’ point of view on HIV
expressed in photos in the Picturing Hope project.
We hope this tool will help the others in their effort to
improve the community education methods and to find
again and again new ways of making the community
more aware of the impact of HIV at personal level.
Authors:
S. Mihale
M. Mocanu
A. M. Schweitzer