“Watchful Eye” has built a powerful community partnership comprised of Brooklyn’s social service leaders, local elected officials; faith based leaders, stakeholders, and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
The mission of the Watchful Eye is to build a community level infrastructure through community mobilization and outreach that allow a cross section of community leaders and stakeholders to jointly develop programs and activities that strengthen collaborative projects to conduct and sustain HIV prevention initiatives that focus on getting people tested, educated and involved.
The “Watchful Eye” Testing, Outreach and Prevention initiative served as a catalyst to develop and execute these community actions and programmatic events providing testing, prevention and education services that reduced stigma and enhance risk reduction throughout the borough of Brooklyn and the City of New York.
It is their goal that HIV/AIDS remain in the forefront and in focus until there is a cure. It is their aim to make it a part of every community agenda. They believe that if individuals are aware of their HIV status, they can and will begin to affect the changes in behavior that will stem the tide of this epidemic in our communities.
Although their Community Action Partnerships are Brooklyn based, it is their goal to expand these partnerships to a national and even a global level. As long as people are willing to work together, get involved and keep a “Watchful Eye”, this initiative can be easily replicated.
We met the founders of Our Watchful Eye at an HIV/AIDS roundtable discussion sponsored by another great organization, Human Intonation. We were immediately struck by how committed to remaining on the front lines of HIV/AIDS activism they were and they were the inspiration for our summer outreaches where we hand out information about preventing the spread of HIV and condoms.
Through them, we remain connected to community events and information to help with the fight against HIV/AIDS.
