What we do:
- Assist community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations and institutions in developing the knowledge necessary to carry out their HIV/AIDS work.
- Create expertise within these communities to conduct their own research.
- Build HIV/AIDS Community Based Research (CBR) capacity across Canada to create new and maintain existing partnerships between community and academia, and to foster the development of new HIV/AIDS CBR projects and applications for funding.
What is unique about the aha centre?
- We are the only one! No other focus on HIV and CBR in Indigenous communities exists in the world.
- Self determination in action - research is in our hands.
- Guide and develop respectful engagement strategies.
- Support research by us and for us.
- Ongoing development of Indigenous methodologies with Indigenous and non-indigenous colleagues around the world.
- Decolonizing methodologies through frameworks such as two-eyed seeing.
- Offer leadership in research processes to maintain excellence in both community and academic research that is ethical, rigorous and valid.
The AHA CENTRE engages researchers with the capacity, interest and skill to undertake health and policy research on:
- the social, cultural environmental and individual determinants driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic
- health services for people living with or at risk of HIV
For the AHA Centre, CBR is an approach that ensures:
- culturally-responsive community-based HIV and determinants of health research
- a foundation for community leadership
- research of relevance to community
- meaningful engagement
- research findings that inform action