Are you ready to celebrate?
LPW will start from 1-14th February each year. ICWAP and the women’s network are preparing for the celebration these days by having fun in various exciting ways.
To push back against the isolation that women living with HIV experience was the development of LOVE POSITIVE WOMEN: Romance Starts at Home! (LPW). LPW started in 2013 as a global holiday for women living with HIV to celebrate annually from February 1st – 14th. To spread the word LPW uses social media to link local grassroots gestures of love globally. Using Valentine’s Day as a backdrop, LPW creates a platform for individuals and communities to engage in public and private acts of love and caring for women living with HIV. Going beyond romantic love to deep community love and social justice, LPW is call to action. It requires participants to reflect on how they as either a woman living with HIV or an ally will commit to loving women living with HIV and then do it. Through action, change can be made to fueling economies of love and compassion. Working from a place of strength, LPW focuses on the idea of interconnectedness, relationship building, loving oneself and loving one’s community. By starting from a place of love, within oneself there are endless ways that the negative impacts that HIV has on women living with HIV can be lessened.
In its 9th year, LPW continued to grow and further its reach in 2016. The International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW) has supported and led the LPW Project
Women living with HIV in the Asia Pacific region have been participating in LPW since 2014. Each year participation has grown with more and more women being involved each year. These activities have ranged from individual actions to dance parties or children’s card making workshops in India; hand beading for red ribbons amongst Indigenous women living with HIV in New Zealand, Australia and Canada as well as workshops and social events in Nepal. In 2015, there were a number of really successful piloted community-based events that took place that had impacts that raised the visibility and confidence of women living with HIV in the region. In 2016 there were various events in Malaysia, India, Thailand, Nepal and New Zealand which included a diverse group of women living with HIV and disabilities.
For LPW 2023, ICW Asia wants to build on the successes of the previous years and expand to include more women and girls living with HIV in an effective and organized way. It is proven in past years that LPW is a very crucial and moral event for those women who are isolated or single.