Resilience - what is it?
Resilience makes us strong. Community makes us thrive.
Communities in Toronto that have been most affected by HIV/AIDS have long histories of surviving adversity – from gay men overcoming homophobia to African, Caribbean and Black communities surviving centuries of racial oppression. Despite adversity, we have grown stronger as individuals and communities by working together.
Our communities have drawn on this resilience in the fight against HIV/AIDS. While authorities were slow to act in the early days of the AIDS crisis, we took collective action and ACT was created. We challenged attitudes and beliefs about HIV/AIDS. We educated and supported one another. We pressed governments to take action.
Thirty years later, we still face many challenges, but we have also accomplished a lot. Our response to HIV/AIDS changed the way we think about illness and people living with it: putting people with HIV at the centre of their health care, advocating for good health as a human right, and drawing the links between social justice and health.
Today, ACT continues to nurture resilience by building the capacity of individuals living with HIV, those at risk for HIV, and the communities most affected by HIV/AIDS. By nurturing individual capacity, creating a sense of belonging and fostering the development of community, we enable ourselves to increase control over and thereby improve our health and well-being.
HIV/AIDS has devastated our communities, but we have found ways to fight back and change things for the better. We have drawn on our individual and collective strengths to not just survive, but to thrive.
This is resilience.
