The Hampshire Gay Health Alliance The Hampshire Gay Health Alliance is the partnership of the three gay men's health promotion organisations in Hampshire. You can use the details below to contact the three organisations.

Some background:

The Alliance represents a collaboration between the three gay men’s heath projects operating within the Strategic Health Authority area: Healthy Gay Hampshire; Inscape (covering the Portsmouth & South East Hampshire area); and the Southampton based Gay Community Health Service (GCHS). The aims of the Alliance are to foster good practice through the sharing of resources and ideas, and developing networked promotions and campaigns. The Alliance also serves as a point of interacting with other agencies with a county-wide remit. Recent activities have included:

Gay Men’s Health Conference

The organisation of this event, held at the end of November 2002, was led by Southampton GCHS. The conference was entitled ‘Hitting New Targets’ was held on Saturday November 30th and was attended by 50 men. It aimed to provide community action based solutions to the challenges of government targets.

Section 28 campaign

As part of the campaign early in 2003 in support of the repeal of section 28 the Alliance worked together to develop a poster for use in venues which was distributed county-wide and a joint letter-writing campaign was undertaken.

"Third party" (or anonymous) reporting of homophobic crime

The Alliance has worked with the Community Safety Department of Hampshire police to start a county wide scheme of third party reporting to enable people who may feel reluctant to approach the police directly to report homophobic hate crime in other ways. Such systematic recording will enable patterns to be identified and better support provided. Following an examination of schemes in other parts of the country a form has been developed and the scheme was launched in October 2003.

Website

This website is the product of the Alliance's joint working and it is hoped that it will enable more men to access the projects. The name was partly chosen to respond well to common words put into search engines.

Condom packs

Agreement has now been reached on developing an HGHA standard range of condom packs. It is hoped to introduce these on the North & Mid Hampshire and Southampton areas early next year. It is hoped that this will save money and aid recognition across the area through common branding.

Supporting Staff

From time to time we hold joint staff functions. The purpose of such events is for staff to get to know each other, to share ideas across all three Projects, and increase a sense of ownership in the Alliance.

For more information about the Alliance, please email info@hgha.org.uk.