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Our Approach
We engage communities in open dialogues about what they already know, already do, and already believe about sexuality, sexual behavior, and health and well being. IGMH goes beyond traditional intervention structured around role-plays, skills-building exercises, and questions that focus on condom use, anal penetration, numbers of sexual partners, HIV testing and drug use.
Our programs and interventions use the following approaches:
- Strength and Resiliency:
We engage individuals and communities with respect, acknowledging that their existing strengths, skills and resources hold the key to successful prevention interventions.
- Sex-Positive:
We acknowledge the value sex, desire, and substance use have in the lives of our target populations. Our approaches are framed in a language of love, intimacy, connection, and pleasure, and articulate alternative notions of beauty and attraction as an HIV prevention strategy.
- Inclusive Participation:
We engage communities in a participatory process whereby they are included in the creation, implementation and evaluation of programs and interventions as a strategy for building social connectedness.
- Harm Reduction-Based:
We offer useful information about negotiating the realities of "safety" in the sexual and social lives of our target populations. We work to foster conversations about risk, danger, and loss of personal agency without restricting our interventions to "abstinence only" educational approaches.
- Open-Ended and Self-Determining:
We strongly believe in the rights of people to be self-determining in their own lives. Our prevention strategies work to increase personal agency and self-determination through the use of open-ended formats, where motivations and emotions in relation to behavior are actively explored.
- Engaging and Entertaining:
We work to create interventions that are cutting-edge, innovative, entertaining, interactive, culturally-appropriate, and fun!
© 2008 Gay Men's Health Crisis |
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