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 By Anke A.
Ehrhardt, Ph.D.
From the early days of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, strong
leadership has been cited as crucial in mounting an
effective response at the community, national, and
global levels. Without strong leadership, progress and
success are impossible.
It has been 27 years
since the first cases of AIDS were recognized and
reported. Many of those who assumed leadership positions
early on in scientific, advocacy, program management,
and other capacities have moved on or are likely to move
on in the near future, due to death (often from AIDS),
retirement, burnout, or other factors. Appropriately,
the HIV/AIDS pandemic was often recognized as a great
crisis and, in the best instances, was responded to as
such. One result of a crisis mentality, however, can be
that planning for the long term is sacrificed to focus
on more urgent priorities.
Along with my
colleagues Thomas Coates, Ph.D. and Greg Szekeres, Ph.D.
of UCLA, I recently wrote an article on the challenges
of the looming leadership vacuum in the world of
HIV/AIDS (Leadership development and HIV/AIDS, AIDS 2008 22:S19-S26; for full text of the
article
click here).
We noted
that, as the epidemic evolves, a “leadership
vacuum” is a continuing threat to the global public
health. New leadership from affected communities is
critical to tackling the social justice and human rights
challenges posed by the epidemic and to assuring the
voice and influence of the countries and populations
most affected by HIV/AIDS in development and
implementation of prevention strategies and policies
best suited to their environments.
Among
our specific recommendations were calls to:
-
Ensure sustainable funding for HIV/AIDS leadership
development programs.
-
Fund
and implement scale-up of effective programs.
-
Develop initiatives to ... transfer leadership to
countries and regions most heavily affected.
-
Increase the number of
leadership programs targeting those most at risk and
most marginalized.
-
Coordinate programs to
ensure ongoing mentorship and support of trainees.
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At the
HIV Center, in collaboration with the
UCLA Program in
Global AIDS (led by Dr. Coates), we have already begun
to act on these recommendations by launching a major new
training program: the MAC AIDS Fund Leadership
Initiative at Columbia University and UCLA, which is the
focus of the
lead story in this issue of the HIV Center
E-Newsletter. Through this exciting new undertaking,
we are currently working with our first two cohorts of
emerging leaders in HIV prevention from South
Africa.
Of
course, the HIV Center's commitment to training the next
generation of researchers working within the HIV/AIDS
field stretches back nearly 20 years. Our oldest
initiative, a postdoctoral fellowship program, was begun
in 1989; a newer affiliation began in 2006 when the HIV
Center became the home to the New York/New Jersey AIDS
Education and Training Center (AETC). All of these
programs are profiled further in the
second feature
of this issue of the HIV Center E-Newsletter.
It is
also with great sadness that we must note the passing of
three men who had a significant impact on the HIV Center
and on the AIDS epidemic in New York, nationally and
globally. Allan Rosenfield, M.D., Sutherland
Miller, Ph.D., and Michael Shernoff, M.S.W., and their
contributions, are all commemorated in the
third feature of
this issue. Finally, I’d
like to briefly address the anxieties that many people
are experiencing in this time of funding cuts, economic
hardship, and uncertain prospects. Over the past two
decades, the HIV Center has been through a number of
economic, political, and other cycles, but we have
persevered, and indeed flourished, through it all.
The HIV Center was
recently renewed for another five years, effective
February 1, 2008, and our investigators have continued
to have success in drawing both public and private
funding. Whatever the economic environment, we will
remain committed to making the most of our existing
resources as well as to finding the new resources that
we need to sustain our mission of HIV/AIDS research,
education, and outreach. |
