About Chiva

Chiva’s mission is to ensure that children, young people and young adults growing up with HIV become healthier, happier and more in control of their own futures. 

We work to ensure young people living with HIV have the treatment and care, knowledge, understanding, skills and wider support needed to live well and achieve their greatest potential.

Focus

With so many young people who were born with HIV in the UK and Ireland now growing up and transitioning to adult care, Chiva supports children and young adults living with HIV up to age 25. There are opportunities for people to be involved with Chiva beyond that age too. For example, helping lead Chiva events and activities for younger people.  

Values

The values that guide all of our work are:

  • Acting with compassion
  • Taking a holistic approach; seeing a whole person, not just HIV
  • Being open and inclusive
  • Developing trust and working with integrity
  • Empowering people through a rights-led approach

Objectives

Chiva aims to:

  • Enhance health and psychosocial wellbeing 
  • Reduce isolation 
  • Ensure young people’s voices inform policy and service and practice development
  • Reduce HIV stigma 
  • Increase knowledge and understanding of HIV 

We achieve our objectives through a range of activities which fall into three categories of work:

Educate

  • Providing a professional membership network to share best practice and provide information
  • Delivering an annual conference and further education events for professionals
  • Supporting and promoting research and clinic audits to improve treatment and care
  • Developing peer reviewed guidelines and sharing these with health professionals to enable best clinical practice
  • Developing and updating the Standards of Care for the treatment of children, young people and young adults living with HIV
  • Developing resources for use by clinic teams and professionals
  • Undertaking campaigns and developing and sharing resources aimed at raising awareness of issues relevant to children, young people, young adults and families living with HIV, and reducing HIV stigma
  • Maintaining a website with updated information for professionals, and children, young adults and families living with HIV
  • Providing expertise around HIV in children and young adults for use by wider organisations
  • Promoting good practice for the transition from child to adult HIV care
  • Collaborating with and supporting the British HIV Association (BHIVA) and professional associations affiliated with BHIVA

Inspire

  • Inspiring children, young people and young adults to achieve their greatest potential
  • Providing direct support for children, young people and young adults which takes a holistic approach, and involves working closely with clinic teams
  • Supporting young adults after they have transitioned to adult care
  • Supporting the Chiva Youth Committee to ensure the voices of children, young people and young adults inform the development of Chiva’s work and are heard in public forums

Belong

  • Running support events, providing a safe space where children, young people and young adults can feel they belong and are less isolated. These include:
    • an annual residential support camp for children and young people
    • participation events such as arts engagement projects for young people and young adults
    • further peer focussed events and residentials across the UK
    • an annual conference to support families living with HIV

Chiva evaluates its work to ensure continuous improvement and responsiveness to children, young people and young adult’s needs and wishes.