THRIVE

Why THRIVE?

The efficacy of antiretroviral therapy (ART) combined with successful treatment programmes means that, provided there is access to care, HIV is no longer a life-limiting infection. With this success comes a growing population of people living and ageing with HIV. While there remains a considerable research gap in understanding how HIV affects the ageing process, it is already well known that improving mental- and physical health of people living with HIV positively impacts their health-related quality of life.

While there are so many seminars or forums on HIV and ageing provided by the scientific community, health care providers and HIV organisations, the global HIV community itself is not yet really being heard or involved in shaping the agenda. We want to change that. How might we engage people living and ageing with HIV to reflect on their current lifestyle and motivate them to adopt a healthier lifestyle to grow up HIV positively?

Our services

We offer a participatory approach called THRIVE to the global HIV community and our partners. THRIVE is a modular approach that people living and ageing with HIV can use to identify and adopt positive changes to their lifestyle to improve their health-related quality of life.

When joining THRIVE, participants will be guided to capturing their challenges, ideas and solutions around growing up positively with HIV. THRIVE consists of the following key steps:

  • The DREAM session: This part acts as a conversation starter to share the goals of participating PLWHIV with others and their allies so we can seek collective support to realise our dreams;
  • Building TRUST: The aim is to ‘collect’ key issues and questions that participants face on their path towards growing up HIV positively. Then allow a reflection and share experiences and ideas for participants to learn from each other and decide what might work best to grow up positively;
  • Sparking CHANGE: Looking back at the dreams and barriers to realise these, in this part the participants will find personal motivation to take small steps towards growing up HIV positively. This session also includes some cultural activities which includes poetry, songs and dance as a motivation to grow up and THRIVE positively with HIV;
  • Let’s GROW together: Small steps towards growing up positively with HIV are essential to boost our motivation. Now, let’s explore some more and be inspired by our dreamtrees to personalise and share our future of living with HIV;
  • Time to SHARE: Now that we have learned something, during this part we will share our learning through a variety of cultural activities tailored to the participants. This may includes poetry, songs and dance as a motivation to thrive positively with HIV together!

Track record

THRIVE as an approach can be tailored to different audiences and situation. We have experience with providing short morning or afternoon sessions as well as multiple day programmes. Thus far, we have successfully worked with partners during these events:

  • We provided a ‘five ways to THRIVE’ session during an online ‘HIV and ageing’ conference organised by Viiv Healthcare UK;
  • THRIVE workshop during the 4th National HIV positive Day, an initiative by Utopia_BXL, which aims to bring together the Belgian HIV community and partners in Brussels, Belgium;
  • Together with AFEW International, Positive Women and Fundacija HelpNowHub we organised a positive lunch for Ukrainian women living with HIV in Poland. During the lunch session we focused on a DREAM session and worked together on our dreamtrees to share and discuss our futures of living with HIV

Ongoing HIV community engagement

When we embarked on our THRIVE journey in March 2023, our wish was to design the THRIVE approach together with the HIV community. As we are learning from every event and we remain in constant dialogue with the global HIV community, THRIVE continues evolving as an approach. Together with the HIV community we continously follow these human-centered design steps:

  1. Framing challenges that people growing up with HIV face to stay healthy: On-going consultation with the HIV community on key challenges related to ageing with HIV, collect and group key challenges and share these challenges with our partners;
  2. Work together on new insights and ideas to overcome these challenges, transform these into content and prototype services and test these together with the HIV community;
  3. Integrate services into (online and physical) games and tools which we then incorporate into the THRIVE approach.

Join our thrivers!

If you would like to be part of our growing team of thrivers to help us design services for the HIV community, get in touch with us!

We are also seeking further support to test and demonstrate our different services. So if you are interested to provide a space and resources for our team, we are happy to discuss the different support modalities with you.