To alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 policies, many initiatives have been developed by civil society organisations – NGOs, local governments, or citizens. A team of national researchers from the RESISTIRÉ project has collected and highlighted a set of particularly relevant initiatives in 27 European countries and in Iceland, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. These Better Stories cover eight specific domains: gender-based violence, the labour market, the economy, gender-pay and pension gaps, gender care gaps, decision-making and politics, environmental justice, human and fundamental rights.

This Better Story was collected by Monica Stroe

Filling the gap left by shortcomings in the public healthcare system

Sens Pozitiv Association is an NGO working to improve the quality of life of HIV patients and of persons from vulnerable categories who are at risk of contracting HIV. A significant part of the organisation’s work consists in supporting HIV-positive persons in accessing the specific HIV medication, thus substituting the public healthcare system’s failure to provide medication and medical services for HIV patients.

Empowering HIV-Positive Individuals and Healthcare Communities

InformatHIV is an initiative of the association intended to provide trustworthy information to HIV-positive patients, as well as to healthcare professionals, activists and the general public. During the COVID19 pandemic, the project expanded to address the new provocations of living with HIV in Romania, by providing information on matters such as vaccination and the HIV-positive status, accessing health services during restrictions and the specific vulnerabilities to COVID-19 of patients living with HIV and HIV-vulnerable persons. The project also initiated raising awareness (e.g. delayed testing, patients’ access to their treating physicians, cuts of public funding for HIV programs etc).

Photo by Hannah Busing from Unsplash

Find out more about the initiative

To alleviate the impacts of COVID-19 policies, many initiatives have been developed by civil society organisations – NGOs, local governments, or citizens. A team of national researchers from the RESISTIRÉ project has collected and highlighted a set of particularly relevant initiatives in 27 European countries and in Iceland, Serbia, the United Kingdom and Turkey. These Better Stories currently cover eight specific domains: gender-based violence, the labour market, the economy, gender-pay and pension gaps, gender care gaps, decision-making and politics, environmental justice, human and fundamental rights.

This Better Story was collected by Monica Stroe.

In Romania, a group of feminist NGOs reunites under the movement #MultumescPentruFlori (#ThankYoufortheFlowers).

A series of collective actions for International Women’s Day 2021

This initiative consists in a series of collective actions that are mostly physical but are spread and organized digitally. The actions happened on International Women’s Day 2021, including: a protest directed against the Government’s failure to address women’s issues such as violence, poverty, lack of access to health services, personal safety; public debates about sexual violence, domestic violence and access to justice, and set of demands of regulatory laws, including electronic monitoring of perpetrators. The series of actions are intended as an advocacy and awareness campaign about the unequal burden of the pandemic on women.

A lack of visibility limits the impacts

The main barriers to the network’s actions, including this one, are the moderate participation and the lack of media visibility of the events, as well as the territorial coverage of the offline events (public protests), restricted mainly to the two largest cities.

Image by #MultumescPentruFlori movement