European AIDS Treatment Group

04/12/2025

𝟭𝟲 𝘿𝙖𝙮𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝘼𝙜𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙨𝙩 𝙂𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧-𝘽𝙖𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙑𝙞𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 | 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙑𝙞𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙃𝙄𝙑: 𝘼 𝙎𝙞𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙒𝙚 𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙩

Interpersonal violence remains one of the most overlooked drivers of the HIV epidemic. For many people—especially women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and those living at the margins, violence is not just a personal tragedy; it is a public health crisis. As someone who has walked this journey for more than three decades, I have seen how fear, control, emotional abuse, and physical harm silence people who most need support, safety, and care.

Violence shapes how people access treatment, disclose their status, protect their health, and navigate relationships. It can interrupt medication, limit autonomy, and erode a person’s ability to make empowered decisions about their body and their wellness.

To end HIV, we must address the violence that surrounds it. This means centering healing, safety, dignity, and trauma-informed care in every space, from homes to clinics to community programs. Our communities cannot move forward unless all of us are safe, seen, and supported.

Linda H Scruggs, DHL, MHS, LPC (Woman Living with an AIDS Diagnosis)
Ribbon – A Center of Excellence, Co-Executive Director
United States

https://www.eatg.org/blogs/16-days-of-activism-against-gender-based-violence-interpersonal-violence-and-hiv-a-silent-intersection-we-must-confront/

Violence shapes how people access treatment, disclose their status, protect their health, and navigate relationships. It can interrupt medication, limit autonomy, and erode a person’s ability to make empowered decisions about their body and their wellness. To end HIV, we must address the violence ...

04/12/2025

Deadline extended: 7 December 2025 (23:59 CET)

SCOPE is looking for you! We are launching three new opportunities designed to strengthen community leadership and support peer-driven HIV prevention across the WHO European region.

02/12/2025

Today is Giving Tuesday, and this year the stakes are higher than ever.

Following our World AIDS Day statement on how communities are the HIV response, EATG warns that years of progress are at risk: across Europe and Central Asia, community-led HIV services are facing shrinking budgets.

Public and private donors are pulling back. Crucially, in 2025 EU Operating Grants never materialised, affecting many NGOs.

That matters a lot. The peer networks, harm-reduction services, community clinics, shelters, support groups for women, migrants, q***r people, s*x workers, people who use drugs — these are the places where the response to HIV truly happens. If these services falter, thousands may lose access to testing, prevention, care and support.

EATG — for more than 30 years a trusted network representing people living with or affected by HIV across Europe and Central Asia — relies increasingly on solidarity and community support.

On this Giving Tuesday, you can make a difference. Your donation to EATG will help:

· sustain grassroots, community-led advocacy that rarely gets political or institutional priority;

· keep a PanEuropean support network going, involved with HIV and co-infections testing, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, care and advocacy work when institutional funding has stalled;

· defend the principle that health must remain accessible to all, no matter who they are or where they come from.

👉 Learn more about why you should support EATG now: https://www.eatg.org/support-us/

👉 Donate here: https://www.eatg.org/donate/,

About Giving Tuesday: https://www.givingtuesday.org/

01/12/2025

At EATG’s Community in Scope workshop, we reaffirmed that community-led services are the backbone of the HIV response, and that amplifying community voices is more urgent than ever. In the face of funding crises and ongoing attacks on human rights, the SCOPE project provides a platform for mutual exchange, learning, and collective action — crucial elements for leading the way forward.

OUR WAY TO TRANSFORM
This work resonates directly with UNAIDS 2025 World AIDS Day theme: “Overcoming disruption, transforming the AIDS response.”

Back in July 2025, we met in Berlin with community representatives who work locally across Europe and Central Asia, as well as members of the SCOPE Community Expert Group, who have played a key role in shaping and guiding the project, to hear firsthand why SCOPE is so important.

The message was clear: sharing knowledge and learning from one another make us unstoppable when we stand together. At a time when HIV prevention services are being disrupted by funding cuts and community-led services risk being deprioritised, joint efforts such as the SCOPE project are more vital than ever.

COMMUNITY IN SCOPE
Today, we are sharing a video shot during the meeting with the voices of Amanita, Marco, Hmayak, Vera and Djamila resonating this oncoming transformation and the need to welcome and support it. Listen to how, through SCOPE, we are strengthening community engagement at local and regional levels and closing the gaps in access to HIV combination prevention services. By placing communities at the centre -especially those most marginalised- we reflect on the transformation UNAIDS calls for: empowering communities to lead the way forward.

ON THIS WORLD AIDS DAY
As UNAIDS urges global leaders to step up, we reaffirm our commitment. Political leadership, international cooperation, human-rights-centred approaches, and, above all, the strengths of communities are not optional; they are essential.

https://www.eatg.org/news/scope-transform-the-response-advancing-hiv-prevention-through-community-leadership/

01/12/2025

Today is

This year’s World AIDS Day arrives with an urgency we can no longer afford to soften. In January, EATG warned that funding cuts were already eroding the foundations of Europe’s HIV response—especially community-led services created by and for people living with HIV. Eleven months later, the political landscape has only hardened. I have watched the consequences unfold in real time. Communities are being pushed aside not by accident, but by political choices.

And make no mistake: the consequences of those choices are gendered.

Women—migrant women, trans women, women who use drugs, s*x workers, and women experiencing and surviving violence—are among the first to feel the impact when budgets are slashed. The cuts rarely touch high-visibility biomedical programmes or the political speeches celebrating “progress.” They fall instead on the peer-run networks, the shelters, the community clinics, the harm reduction services—the very infrastructures that keep people alive. These losses are not collateral damage. They are the result of political decisions that devalue community work because it is often done by women, by q***r leadership, by migrants, by people living in poverty.

In January, we stressed that communities are not an accessory to the HIV response. 𝙒𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙃𝙄𝙑 𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙚. Yet across Europe, governments continue to divert resources away from human rights–based approaches and toward securitisation, border policies, and austerity—policies that fuel the very inequalities that drive HIV transmission and poor health outcomes.

We must name this clearly: funding cuts are a form of violence. They deepen stigma, expand inequity, and undermine every promise made about ending AIDS.

But communities refuse to be silent.

We choose to organise.
We choose to disrupt.
We choose to demand that decision-makers stop sidelining the voices of women, q***r communities, trans communities, migrants, s*x workers, and people who use drugs in favour of politically convenient narratives.

𝙊𝙣 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 𝘼𝙄𝘿𝙎 𝘿𝙖𝙮, and every other day of the year—and for every year until this epidemic is over—we call on policymakers, donors, and institutions to stop treating community services as optional. Recommit to human rights. Reinvest in gender transformative, community-led care. Restore the funding that austerity has stolen.

The cost of inaction is far higher than the cost of investment. When governments fail to act, the result is not savings—it is new infections, preventable deaths, collapsing services, and generations forced to live with the consequences of political negligence. The price is paid by the communities already pushed to the margins.

Ending AIDS is not a technical challenge. It is a political one—and political choices can change.

Nicoletta Policek
EATG, Executive Director





https://www.eatg.org/news/world-aids-day-2025-communities-are-the-hiv-response/]

30/11/2025

AIDS is NOT over!
➡️Over 40M people are living with HIV globally​
➡️10M people are waiting for HIV treatment​
➡️1.3M people acquired HIV in 2024​

This can and must change!​

Leaders must reaffirm their commitment to end AIDS and support countries and communities through this difficult and challenging times.​

https://www.unaids.org/en/2025-world-aids-day

29/11/2025

Djamila Schäffler, Berlin Ballroom Pier, Germany
“A lot of people, a lot of young kids, were really intimated by the lack of information. Having community role models helps them develop better and healthier practices and attitudes towards HIV combination prevention”

video coming on

29/11/2025

Hmayak Avetisyan, National Trans Coalition Human Rights NGO (NTC), Armenia
“If you give the tools for policy changes, then real changes happen because when we are together, we are unstoppable”

video coming on

28/11/2025

Vera Rodriguez, ESWA, The Netherlands
“Decriminalisation of s*x work could decrease HIV levels globally and could be one of the most effective measures to reduce it because s*x work is work!”

video coming on

27/11/2025

Marco Stizioli, Brescia Checkpoint, Italy
“The problem is not HIV but discrimination because HIV is just a virus. The virus doesn’t decide who to attack. The problems are that the politicians, the government, the institution don’t give us the tools to protect ourselves.”

video coming on

27/11/2025

Amanita Calderón-Cifuentes, TGEU – Trans Europe and Central Asia, Germany
“We are the most real people you will ever meet because we have paid with blood, sweat and tears and s***m. The price for the privilege of owning ourselves”

video coming on

26/11/2025

✨ Applications are open for the Study Trips! ✨

Are you passionate about community advocacy, HIV, s*xual health, or grassroots organising?

EATG’s SCOPE project invites motivated activists and community workers to apply for a study trip!

Before submitting your application, get inspired by the experiences of Juan Fran, Tedo, Atanas and Anastasiia, past participants of the SCOPE study trips programme. Their reflections offer a great sense of what SCOPE is all about: learning, exchange, empowerment, and community.

🌍 Read the Study Trip Blogs:

📍 London – from Apoyo Positivo (Spain) to PrEPster (UK)
https://www.eatg.org/blogs/scope-study-trip-from-apoyo-positivo-spain-to-prepster-uk/

📍 Paris – from Association Xenon (Georgia) to Gaïa-Paris Association (France)
https://www.eatg.org/blogs/scope-study-trip-from-association-xenon-georgia-to-gaia-paris-association-france/

📍 Lisbon – from Stronger Together (North Macedonia) to G*T (Portugal)
https://www.eatg.org/blogs/scope-study-trip-from-stronger-together-north-macedonia-to-gat-portugal/

📍 Yerevan – from NGO Cohort (Ukraine) to New Generation NGO (Armenia)
https://www.eatg.org/blogs/scope-study-trip-from-ngo-cohort-ukraine-to-new-generation-ngo-armenia/

👉 Apply by 3 December and take the next step in your HIV advocacy path.
https://www.eatg.org/calls-and-vacancies/scope-study-trip-in-the-field-of-hiv-combination-prevention-a-peer-to-peer-learning-programme/