TRANSCRIPT

The CFUWSD Grannies is a subgroup of the Stephen Lewis Foundation

Stephen Lewis started a foundation for grandmothers in Africa who were left to their own devices to take care of their grandchildren. In many cases the AIDS epidemic meant that the parents were dying and the grandmothers were left to take care of their grandchildren.

Stephen Lewis was doing this by developing grassroots projects. Teaching people, educating and creating awareness about how the AIDS was transmitted.

He decided to form a Grandmothers group where Canadian grandmothers would be twinned with African grandmothers. This was installed as a support system for the African grandmothers. So they brought 100 African grandmothers to the AIDS conference in Toronto; there were also there 200 Canadian grandmothers. That was the beginning.

The African Grandmothers at that time they were bereft, they did not know what was happening to them. They were having a lot of problems, they were not organized. So, through the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the grandmothers of Canada have raised 9 million dollars for the grandmothers in Africa. The Stephen Louis Foundation has technical support workers on the ground in Africa. They get requests for up to a hundred projects a month, to fund them. So what they do is that they are taking the African ground workers and they will say to them: "go to this project." The project isn't formed yet. But they need to have a charter, have to have an organization, to know how to do bookkeeping; they have to meet a certain amount of basic requirements. So the groundworkers will go to the project and check and see if the organization meets all these particular requirements, and if they do have these requirements, they will get funding. It will start out with a small grant, maybe 10 000 dollars.

"Wool Fact" is one of the first projects which was funded and what the project was is that they were teaching the women about how to deal with their own grief and how to counsel their grandchildren who had lost their parents.

It is very difficult to have to lose your child, and also have to deal with taking care of the grandchildren. Because they had no other forms of support then, the grandmothers.

Now... what is happening is that these grandmothers are being empowered by doing these small projects; they have learned how to deal with things, how to organize, how to keep the books, and they are doing income generating projects. They are also dealing with the governments to get them to change the laws. They are learning how to lobby...

So what the Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign and the CFUWSD Grannies are doing here are two things:
- Raising funds to help these small projects
- Advocating with our government

One of the things we are advocating for is a law that is being passed. Going through the House of Commons. One of the things which the grandmothers are saying to the government is that"you have to make sure that someone who is going to be affected by this law is going to be heard." What is happening is that the pharmaceutical companies are saying "we can't afford to make generic drugs at regular prices." They want to make profit. So there is a lot going on with the grandmothers lobbying the politicians to make sure that this law that is soon going to go to the third reading... before going to the senate. There is a committee that has already received 4000 postcards from grandmothers, saying "are you sure that someone from sub-Saharan countries is heard?" Because getting these drugs means a huge amount to people who are suffering from AIDS. So hopefully it is going to pass the third reading soon. Once it gets to the Senate... we will have to start all over again toward the Senate. Many grandmothers know some of the senators, so they will be lobbying it to the senate.

1) This is kind of the empowerment of the Canadian grandmothers but also the grandmothers of Africa. Many of the Canadian grandmothers are retired professionals. In every province, they have advocacy leaders in different sectors of the province, they give us updates regularly. These retired professionals, they want to be useful. And this is a way to be useful. So it is an empowerment of older women. They want to feel that whatever they do and contribute has an effect.