Innovative Legacy Project Launched

CAAT is excited to announce the launch of the Legacy Project: a program of structured mentorship support to promote collaboration, community succession and meaningful participation of PHAs.  We are grateful for the funding support from Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) that made this project possible.

This project aims to provide structured mentorship support to PHAs who have graduated from other capacity building programs to apply their knowledge and skills on areas of HIV prevention, support or other career track development.

The structured mentorship program includes the following components:

  1. A community of learning made up of a pool of diverse peer mentors, mentees, and agency partners
  2. Develop and conduct training on skills on mentoring
  3. Engage at least 20 agencies to provide practicum opportunities for PHAs for experiential learning
  4. Provide structured mentorship support to a pool of PHAs who are interested in pursuing work in HIV prevention, support or other career track development.

The key collaborating agency partners working with CAAT on this exciting and innovative project includes the Ethno-racial Treatment Support Network (ETSN), Ontario AIDS Network (OAN), Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN), AIDS Bereavement Project of Ontario (ABPO) and African and Caribbean Council on HIV/AIDS in Ontario (ACCHO) and the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation (TPWA) who also acts as the financial trustee for our funding. A project advisory committee has been formed to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of the project that includes our agency partners as well as many PHA volunteers from different backgrounds who were trained through the above organizations’ capacity building programs.

We hope the program will lead to an energized HIV/AIDS communities with increased level of cross generational, cross cultural and cross sectoral collaboration amongst PHAs and other allies.  We hope to see more PHAs being able to apply the skills they learnt through various capacity building initiatives;  we hope to see more PHAs actively participating in a variety of community service agencies within and beyond the HIV/AIDS sectors in both paid positions and as volunteers. We hope to create new partnerships that will improve the quality, access and cultural competencies of services provided to all Ontarians.