To Cope with AIDS, a Focal Point in the Center of Paris

"Dessine-Moi un Mouton organizes therapeutic holidays four times per year for seropositive or seronegative children and adolescents. Having a contaminated relative myself, I had the honor of sponsoring one of these stays, financed in 2006 with the help of the Veolia foundation. For the psychologist and the childcare specialist of the association, these are key moments enabling them to deal closely with the difficulties of the children and to compile the indispensable information for working with them over the long term. Today, as the association grows with the new reception center, we once again want to help it to continue to improve the comprehensive and daily handling of these children."
Rupert Schmid

To cope with steadily growing demand: this is the challenge that the managers of the association Dessine-Moi un Mouton attempt to meet every day. Since 1990, they have been working alongside children, adolescents and families struck by HIV/AIDS, by helping them recover their autonomy, restore or reinforce the family bonds, and integrate better, despite the illness, through an accompaniment in their medical observation. In 2006, they received 200 new families (more than 1000 in the last 17 years), with 360 children and 79 adolescents, referred by the hospitals, maternity wards, social aid for children, etc. Today, because the pandemic continues to spread, as many as two families per week sometimes knock on the doors, needing very concrete aid, through multidisciplinary, psychological, paramedical, social and educational support. However, lacking space and resources, the association is too often forced to refer them to other structures or to make them wait for three to six months for a first appointment, at the risk of losing all the benefits of early admission.

Welcoming More Families and Helping Them More Effectively

The creation of a new reception facility in the center of Paris will address this urgent need for capacity. It will also enable the association, which also plans to boost its staff, to combine its three programs (perinatality, childhood, adolescence) and its teams, in order to improve the quality of its services. The key to success is more availability, better coordination to do the work over the long term with the children, adolescents and parents who live with a contaminated kin.

the Veolia foundation had already aided Dessine-Moi un Mouton to raise the funds necessary to organize therapeutic holidays for 14 children in 2006. It confirms for the association today by financing the outfitting and equipment of this unique facility in France, in terms of comprehensive support to the families concerned.