The Primate's World Relief and Development Fund has counted on the faith filled generosity of Canadian Anglicans since it was founded 45 years ago. This generosity has enabled PWRDF to reach out to people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and aboriginal communities in Canada in order to forge enduring partnerships with community groups, agencies, coalitions, all of us united to build a more just and equitable world.
In working together, we have learned that all of our development partner relationships must be ones based on shared values, equality, mutuality, transparency, inclusiveness, and solidarity. Through these relationships, we have received far more in knowledge, faith, and sense of justice than we have given in financial contributions. PWRDF is a better organization for having participated in these partnerships; the Anglican Church of Canada is better for the development partnerships that it has supported over the years.
PWRDF does not actually implement development projects; we leave that important work to the people who know best what their communities and countries need: our development partners. Our responsibilities in a partner relationship are to raise the funds necessary for project implementation, to raise awareness among Canadian Anglicans about the issues being addressed by PWRDF supported projects, and to advocate for change towards a more just world.
Building partner relationships is a slow process of developing confidence and trust in one another through shared values, sharing understanding of best practices in development, and through living up to promises that are made. In the same way that our partners commit themselves to implementing activities that will respond to community needs and address root causes of injustice, PWRDF commits itself to raising sufficient funds to sustain the projects over time. Often specific projects are funded through a three-year funding agreement; sometimes partner relationships continue for 10 to 15 years. These long-term relations require long-term financial planning. Long-term relationships mean that PWRDF needs to have, over the long term, the financial stability to be able to transfer funds as needed on a regular basis throughout the life of the project.
This organizational commitment to financial stability as a pre-requisite for long-term financial planning is motivating PWRDF to look with ever greater interest at planned giving. Just as PWRDF is developing long-term relations with our development partners, it is also building long-term relations with planned giving annuitants. The negotiation of terms and conditions of the annuities provides PWRDF with a unique opportunity to have a clearer understanding of what funds will be available in the future. As we build on this firm foundation of generous annuitants, the financial future of PWRDF is both brighter and more secure thanks to an increased number of planned giving annuities. Planned giving is an option that makes sense to the potential annuitant, to PWRDF, and to our development partners.
Financial security is especially important when taking on such an important challenge as the global pandemic of HIV/ AIDS. PWRDF is building a Partnership for Life for a generation without AIDS, basing this new initiative on the repeated, insistent requests of our development partners to become more fully engaged in the global struggle against HIV and AIDS. We have no alternative but to stand in solidarity with our partners in their times of greatest need.
Just try to picture yourself in a world devastated by AIDS, where more than three million people die every year, where there are more than 17 million children orphaned by AIDS, where essential services in health care and education are drastically reduced through the deaths of teachers, nurses, doctors, lab technicians from AIDS, where food supplies can no longer be guaranteed because of the deaths from AIDS of farmers, transport workers, produce intermediaries, and market vendors, where the life expectancy has dropped from 62 years to 47 years because of the horrific mortality due to AIDS. How would you respond if most of your ministry was given over to pastoral care of the sick and dying, counseling to dying mothers and children, to a seemingly endless series of funerals?
The image that comes to mind when trying to comprehend how to respond in the face of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is that terrifying moment when you lose your footing and feel yourself drawn upward into the cresting wave just as it crashes down, dragging you along with it. Important lessons that one learns swimming in the surf are to stay close together, conserve your strength and not get carried away by the force of the current.
The image that comes to mind when trying to comprehend how to respond in the face of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is that terrifying moment when you lose your footing and feel yourself drawn upward into the cresting wave just as it crashes down, dragging you along with it. Important lessons that one learns swimming in the surf are to stay close together, conserve your strength and not get carried away by the force of the current.
We have learned similar important lessons from our partners in eastern and southern Africa as we face the challenges of HIV/AIDS together. We will stand firmly with them in solidarity throughout this crisis. We are doing our best to ensure that there are always resources available from PWRDF to meet their needs. By focusing on small community based responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we are building a firm, faith filled and hopeful foundation that shows people in Africa and Canada that the global pandemic can be faced up to, challenged, and eventually overcome.
Let me tell you about two PWRDF supported projects that help people cope with the forceful impact of AIDS on all aspects of individual and community life across Africa. On Dec. 1st this year, churches across Canada held AIDS vigils based on the experience of the women in the Point of Light project in Etwatwa, South Africa. Low-income women have been trained as foster mothers to provide home care, pastoral advice and counseling, and supportive activities to AIDS affected mothers and their children in the last weeks and months of life. As the family prepares for the inevitable death of a parent, these foster mothers are there with warm meals, consoling words, prayer, and assistance with daily activities. To ensure that the memories and experience of a lifetime are not lost, the women make memory boxes, filling them with photos, letters, legal documents, medical records, words of advice, recipes that will keep the mothers alive in the hearts and minds of their children long after they are gone. Not only will the memories be passed on from generation to generation, but this model of home care and transfer of knowledge and values will be passed on far beyond Etwatwa as community after community faces up to the onslaught of HIV/AIDS.
In PWRDF, our lives have been enriched by a long-term relation with the diocese of Kampala in the Church of Uganda. We have much to learn from them, as Uganda is the only country in Africa that has managed to reduce the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. With the support of PWRDF, the Mothers' Union and the diocesan development staff have mobilized women in the diocese to stand up to HIV/AIDS. Together, the women of Kampala diocese maintain a program that includes home visiting, pastoral care, HIV prevention and education programming, inter-generational work to ensure that families stay together and grow together, encouraging nutrition counseling and traditional medicine to combat infection, income generation projects to ensure that family autonomy can be maintained, education of youth to encourage changed behaviour and healthy sexuality.
The sea is very, very rough and the currents are strong. A great wave is about to crash over us and tragedy is all around. Yet our faith is strong, our belief in our partners is unshakeable; we are in this struggle against HIV/AIDS for the long haul. Think about becoming a planned giving annuitant to make sure that the resources are there at every step of the way as PWRDF works with its development partners to guarantee a Partnership for Life for a Generation without AIDS.
