AFISE Community Education Multimedia Toolkit

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