Resources for the Christian HIV Response

In the book “Development and Faith”, the authors, Katherine Marshall and Marisa van Saanen, devote a chapter to faith communities and HIV. In this chapter they say the following about “Information”:  “Teams working on HIV/AIDS at the local level are hungry for information, especially about what works and what does not. Using the diverse communication channels and networks of faith networks creatively and well is one option.”

It is part of the dream of CARIS that churches and faith communities not only become “Channels of Hope”, but also become “Channels of Knowledge and Information” about HIV and the church's response to HIV. Since 2004 CARIS has made a lot of progress in being a source of accurate and reliable information for churches responding to HIV. We have a wonderful resource centre at our offices in Randburg, we have helped organisations set up local resource centres and we have provided a comprehensive service through our webpage and electronic tools.

We know that there is a sector of the Southern African Christian Community responding to HIV that cannot access the electronic services we provide. We have looked at various ways to also provide information materials to this market.
Through a partnership with Bybel-Media, we now have the opportunity to provide a resource pack containing a selection Christian books, CD-ROMs and DVDs focussing on HIV from a Christian perspective to a small number of these organisations. The materials include valuable resources from the Called to Care series of Strategies for Hope, World Council of Churches Ecumenical HIV Initiative in Africa, Bybel-Media and others.

If you know of an organisation or church who would like to be a "Channel of Knowledge" in their community that can’t access the website, I would like to ask you to print the application form for them, and to encourage them to apply for these materials. Applications should be completed in full and can be emailed, faxed or posted to us.

We regret that for the moment we can only provide this service to organisations in Southern Africa and all organisations need to commit to filling in an evaluation form after receiving the packs. Information about participating organisations will also become part of the online CARIS project database.

Please also let us know about any organisations that would be interested in partnering with us in order to expand this service.