One Love
One Love empowers, educates and encourages young people living with HIV to develop important life-skills, make healthy choices and let their voices be heard through year-round, youth-led, peer support and leadership programs.
Babies born with HIV fifteen or twenty years ago were never expected to survive, but the increasing effectiveness of medication during the past decade means that these youth are still with us, fighting to live normal and productive lives.
Too often, however, they live with a weighty secret, and feelings of isolation and anxiety about the future.
Young people with HIV are often dealing with loss of parents, poverty, depression, discrimination, unemployment, under-education, and neuro-developmental delays. These realities underscore the largely unmet need for resources to prepare them for an adulthood most thought they would never reach.
One Love shatters these limitations through education and community-building. Youth participants develop leadership, advocacy and life skills to achieve good health, positive behavior, socioeconomic success and civic engagement. Programs are designed with the input of a Youth Task Force composed of ten HIV positive young people and a broad partnership among several New England-based medical institutions and social service agencies.
In November 2010, One Love was highlighted in a front-page, feature article and video feature in the New York Times. The program is further described on the One Love: Initiatives page.
Partners
- AIDS Care Ocean State, Providence, Rhode Island
- Boston HAPPENS, Children’s Hospital Boston, MA
- Boston Medical Center, Boston, MA.
- Children’s Hospital AIDS Program, Boston, MA
- Community Music Center of Boston, Boston, MA
- Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, NH
- Dimock Community Health Center, Boston, MA
- JRI Health, Boston, MA
- Latin American Health Institute, Boston, MA.
- MassCARE Program, MA Department of Public Health
- Project Kindle, Valencia, CA
- The SPARK Center, Mattapan, MA
