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New Partners Initiative: Government funds for HIV/AIDS care
and prevention
By Manda Gibson
Is your church or ministry working with HIV/AIDS care or prevention in a country severely affected by HIV/AIDS? If so, you may be eligible for U.S. government funding through the New Partners Initiative. The New Partners Initiative – which is part of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – offers a total of $200 million to organizations, including churches and other faith-based groups that have little or no experience working with the U.S. government.
“In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush announced the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” states the New Partners Initiatives fact sheet. “Its goals include supporting treatment for 2 million HIV-infected people, preventing 7 million new HIV infections, and supporting care for 10 million people infected with HIV and affected by AIDS, in 15 severely affected focus countries. In order to affect this many lives, it is necessary to work with a vast number of partners that can do the work on the ground.”
In many cases, the partners who can do “the work on the ground” are churches, both from the United States and other countries, who are doing or planning work in the focus countries. The focus countries are Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Zambia.
One goal of the New Partners Initiative is to increase the Emergency Plan’s ability to reach people with needed services by identifying new partner organizations, increasing the capacity of those organizations to provide prevention and care services, and increasing the total number of Emergency Plan partners. Additionally, the initiative hopes to develop indigenous capacity to address HIV/AIDS in the focus nations and, thus, to make the focus countries’ prevention and care efforts more sustainable.
Organizations interested in receiving New Partners Initiative funds can apply for grants through the fiscal year 2008. To be eligible, a non-governmental organizations must be working in any of the 15 Emergency Plan focus countries and have little or no experience working with the U.S. government. “Little or no experience” means that the organization has received no more than $5 million in U.S. government funding during the previous five years, excluding disaster or emergency assistance or funding as a subcontractor.
Churches and other faith-based organizations who receive assistance through the New Partners Initiative will have to follow certain guidelines about sharing their faith as they minister. The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives says, “… you can not use any part of a direct federal grant to fund religious worship, instruction, or proselytization. Instead, organizations may use government money only to support the non-religious social services that they provide. Therefore, faith-based organizations that receive direct governmental funds should take steps to separate, in time or location, their inherently religious activities from the government-funded services that they offer. … This does not mean your organization can't have religious activities. It simply means you can't use taxpayer dollars to fund them. …
“If someone asks you about your personal faith while you are providing a government-funded service, you may answer briefly. But if you wish to have a longer discussion on matters of faith, you should set up a time to speak with that person later. In this way, you avoid using government funds for what might be taken to be an inherently religious activity, and the program is kept on track. But you also have an opportunity later to share your faith and explain why you do what you do.”
-- Learn more about the New Partners Initiative at http://www.pepfarnpi.com.
-- To learn more about how accepting government funds will affect your ministry, visit the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Web site.
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