HIV Collaborative Fund: For Donors

The Collaborative Fund for HIV Treatment Preparedness welcomes all prospective donors to contribute to our fast growing movement of HIV/AIDS activists working to change the environment of treatment access and education across the world. We are actively seeking new funding to increase our grantmaking in our regions (current funding level is $200,000 per region) and to continue our innovative mechanism of involving HIV/AIDS communities in the grants decision making process.

Two new contributing partners are now supporting ITPC/Collaborative Fund activities. They are the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Both have made multi-year commitments to our efforts and we welcome them. For further information, contact David Barr at dbarr@tides.org

The Collaborative Fund works in 10 regions across the globe and we would be happy to discuss any suggestions in how you would like to distribute your funding. We work with a variety of private foundations, corporate foundations, individuals and family foundations.

We are supported by an extensive network of global activists under the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC). The Tides Center and the Tides Foundation oversee the Collaborative Fund's grants administration and financial administration.

Please refer to our 2005 Recent Evaluation Report by LTG Associates, Inc. for an overview of our activities in 2005.

The Collaborative Fund for HIV Treatment Preparedness is a 501 c 3 entity as a project of the Tides Network. We will provide documentation upon request.

Please feel free to browse our website and contact us if you would like to contribute or learn more about our project.

CONTACT

Telephone
(212) 509-1049 Susie Lim

Email
David Barr, Project Director - dbarr@tides.org
Susie Lim, Project Coordinator - slim@tides.org

Fax
(212) 509-1059

Mailing Address
The Collaborative Fund for HIV Treatment Preparedness
c/o Tides Foundation
Attn: Susie Lim
55 Exchange Place
Suite 402
New York, NY 10005

The Collaborative Fund is currently raising funds for our 2007-2008 budget. The International Steering Group (steering group of international activists) and the Collaborative Fund prepared a comprehensive budget following the International Steering Committee meeting in July. This budget includes Collaborative Fund grant making activities and administration, funding for project technical assistance and regional network coordination, funding for ITPC administration and advocacy and communications projects, and for program evaluation. Please contact us for more details if you are interested in contributing or would like more details.

Two meetings were scheduled to bring together current Collaborative Fund contributing partners, Tides Foundation staff and ITPC representatives from each of our regions. The meetings were held in October 26, 2005 in Montreal and November 17, 2005 in Geneva. We have also invited new potential contributing partners, as we seek to raise funds for 2006. At the meeting, ITPC representatives discussed treatment preparedness in their respective regions and the ways in which ITPC and the Collaborative Fund have worked throughout the year to address these needs.

2006-2007 Update
The Collaborative Fund budget for 2006-2007 totals approximately $4.6 million. In addition to administrative expenses, this would provide:

$200,000 for small grants in each of ten regions (if we raise more than $4.6 million, increasing the amounts available for grant making is the first priority);
$50,000 per region for technical assistance;
$50,000 per region for network support;
$10,000 per region for program monitoring
$67,000 per region for regional coordination and CRP meetings

Over the course of 2006, a total of 184 projects in 73 countries were funded around the world to support community mobilization for access to HIV care, services and education. All these projects were selected through regionally-based peer-review processed led by community leaders in each of 10 regions, the majority of whom are people living with HIV.

Please find the Grant Summaries for the projects funded in 2006 in our 2006 Grant Summaries document.

In addition to funding projects through small grants, the Collaborative Fund also supports community mobilization for HIV care and services through provision of funding for technical assistance, regional network development and coordination, and program monitoring and evaluation. Separate reports on each of these activities are forthcoming.

In most regions, this list represents a second round of funded projects (in Eastern Europe/Central Asia, a fourth round of funding is complete). Another round of grant making in now in the planning stages in each region and many regions will complete this round by December 2007.

The HIV Collaborative Fund is a partnership of the Tides Network and the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC). Since December 2006, ITPC has reached several important milestones, including:

- the installation of its first International Coordinator, Greg Gray.
- the release of a third Missing the Target report, analyzing HIV treatment access in six countries
- held a global meeting on strengthening ITPC governance and communications systems (full meeting report available at the Collaborative Fund website)
- met with representatives from WHO, UNAIDS and the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria to discuss the furtherance of the Universal Access Initiative

Over the course of this year, the HIV Collaborative Fund will increase its commitment to program monitoring and evaluation, technical assistance and regional network development. Other developments include the division of the West and Central African regions to better meet the needs of people living with HIV in those areas and the development of Collaborative Fund activities in North Africa. We will also seek to increase the total amount of grant money available for distribution in each region.

A growing collaborative of contributing partners support the HIV Collaborative Fund, who are listed below. The support of each of our partners is essential in supporting this unique community-driven funding mechanism.

We very much want to thank all our Contributing Partners. Contributing Partners supporting the Collaborative Fund to date in 2007:

AIDS Fonds Netherlands
Calamus Foundation
Ford Foundation
Ford Foundation – Russia
Gagarin Family Trust
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Guttag Family Foundation
Johnson & Johnson
Levi Strauss Foundation
Open Society Institute
Overbrook Foundation
Pfizer Foundation
Stephen Lewis Foundation
Department for International Development (DFID)
Elton John AIDS Foundation
United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
World Health Organization (WHO)
UNAIDS
Tides Foundation
Starry Night Fund
Puget Sound Fund
MAC AIDS Fund
American Jewish World Service
John M. Lloyd Foundation

In an effort to reduce administrative costs and improve our administrative capacity, the Collaborative Fund has been re-configured within the Tides Network. All financial and staffing administration will now be handled by Tides Center. Grants administration will continue to be handled by Tides Foundation. This change will improve our efficiency, as Tides Center is better structured to meet our varied administrative needs. It will also reduce our indirect fees by over 50% from 2005. For more information about Tides Center and Tides Foundation, visit www.tides.org

Please contact us if you would like to receive materials from these meetings.

Results from the WHO Program Evaluation
In 2005, WHO funded an independent evaluation of the Collaborative Fund. LTG Partners, based in Washington DC, were selected to conduct the evaluation. Their report is in the final stages of production and will be released shortly. The full report will be available on the Collaborative Fund website and presented at our Satellite Session at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August (see below). We want to thank Cathleen Crain and Niel Takashima and their staff for all their hard work. The findings from the evaluation are extremely impressive. The Collaborative Fund is found to have:

Rapidly initiated a high level of program activity.
Activities are well grounded in identified needs.
Service–focused grantees are reaching highly vulnerable populations.
Grantees work with health and other systems to reduce stigma, increase system responsiveness, and increase understanding of PLWHA issues.
Raised and moved millions of dollars US to grantees globally.
Successfully tracking the utilization of the money.
Providing regionally-based, infrastructure-focused technical assistance through Regional Managers.
Achieving GIPA in projects around the world.
Conducting resource development for grant-making maintenance and growth.

The work of grantees was found to be:

Focused, intensive, and creative.
Assessing systems and developing approaches and services that fill the gaps.
Leveraging, many times over, the amount of grants received.
Complementary rather than competitive.

CRP & RAC successes include:

Functional organizations have been formed in regions that may be highly diverse and in which there may be historic divisions among groups.
Developed and distributed tenders that reach deeply into community-focused HIV/AIDS service and advocacy networks.
Systems for reviewing proposals and ensuring fairness and regional appropriateness have been developed.
One CRP has already had a succession of membership without apparent loss of functions.
The CIS/Baltic States have made thoughtful second-and third-generation grants not favoring previous grantees.

Below is a list of outputs from Collaborative Fund projects in four (of ten) regions over a six-month period:

Advocacy

1,300 Training workshop participants
6,100 Publications distributed
1 National conference

Community Mobilization

268 Volunteers trained
2,667 individuals recruited
3,063 Participants in activities through 220 outreach activities
28,858 publications and posters distributed

Reduction of Stigma and Discrimination

1,120 Participants in 25 Workshops
1,700 survey participants in 5 surveys

Treatment Literacy

2,100 Participants in workshops
2,700 students reached through 44 lectures

Direct Services

644 Legal consultations
4,331 Direct services or referrals

Expanded Information on the Collaborative Fund website

Treatment literacy materials: Many projects are developing treatment literacy materials in multiple languages. All of these materials will be available on the website as they are sent to us. There are already several treatment education booklets on the website. This is the beginning of a global repository of treatment education materials developed by Collaborative Fund projects.
Case studies and highlights: We have developed short case studies highlighting projects in each region. These studies can serve as models for “best practices” in the development of other programs.
Project reports: Now that grantee projects are well underway, we are receiving six-month reports about their efforts. As they come in, they are posted on the website by region.
Reports from Technical Assistance workshops: Several regions have now held meetings that bring all regional grantees together to discuss their work, share experiences, gain technical knowledge and plan for future activities. Such workshops have been held in CIS/Baltics region, Caribbean, Latin America, South Asia and <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Southeast Asia (this last was not region-wide, but several smaller events held in specific countries). Similar workshops will be held in Southern, Eastern and West/Central Africa over the next few months. In addition to workshop reports, the website contains many of the grantee project presentations and lots of photos.