The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Novel AIDS campaign set for launch

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 04, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Novel AIDS campaign set for launch

M. Dinesh Varma

Street plays, slide shows and top-down training initiatives in corporate houses planned

CHENNAI : A canny mix of fundamental and out-of-the-box communication strategies will push a month-long HIV/AIDS awareness campaign being launched by Scope International, a subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank.

A stilt-walk on Nungambakkam High Road to highlight the red ribbon cause marked the start of a sustained drill to get people to pause and think about HIV/AIDS. More is to follow in the form of street plays, slide shows for cinema halls and top-down training initiatives in corporate houses.

`Living with HIV', one of the two major Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives identified by the organisation, will reach out to a cross-section of people over the next month or so with a communication strategy ranging from street theatre to college visits and slide shows for film audiences.

"One of our focus groups will be women and children infected or affected by HIV/AIDS," said Shashi Ravichandran, who heads Scope's Corporate Affairs in Chennai. Most women infected by spouses have no support mechanisms, to compound the social scorn. Scope plans to help such women put their lives back on the rails and also provide for their children's education.

Scope already has ongoing partnerships with NGOs such as Nalamdana and Positive Women Network to spread messages on HIV/AIDS in peripheral communities around the city where the campaign has involved street plays and distribution of Tamil leaflets.

Corporate houses are an important port of call for the resource persons at Scope who have been groomed as trainers in HIV/AIDS education. The employee base in most companies, especially in the IT sector, is not only vast but young. It is absolutely vital to put across to this vibrant segment of the workforce the right messages of what HIV/AIDS is and what it isn't, said Ms. Ravichandran.

Scope has fine-tuned the Peer Educators initiative launched within the organisation in 2003 into a concise component of its induction programme. It has also been doing outreach training for employees of a few corporate firms in the city and plans to reach out to more. The organisation is also looking to engage a couple of major companies in the city to raise the profile of the HIV/AIDS campaign. Scope can be reached on 28219698.

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