Blue Sky Trust

The logo for Blue Sky Trust, featuring the tagline 'together for the journey'

Tell us about your organisation/department/project (your aims, what you do, who you work with):

Blue Sky Trust support and connect over 150 people affected by HIV in the North East/North Cumbria at every step of their HIV journey. One-to-one support, peer mentoring, courses, educational workshops, wellbeing retreats, peer support groups and creative projects promote connectedness, increase confidence, and boost self-management skills. We strive to support people from a diverse demographic background.

We encourage people living with HIV to get involved too, through raising awareness of HIV, by sharing their story, or by volunteering in a wide variety of roles. In 2024, they volunteered for over 1000 hours!

We are passionate about reducing HIV stigma, so we deliver HIV Awareness Training as well as community outreach to educate professionals and the community.

We also deliver relationships and sex education (RSHE) training to over 3000 young people each year.
 

Tell us why being a Haref Ally is important for you and your organisation

We joined as a Haref Ally recently and it has given us access to fantastic training and networks which are helping us broaden our reach, consider new partnerships and improve our services.
 

Tell us about anything that you or your organisation has done to improve how you work with ethnically marginalised communities

It is very important that organisations who support ethnically marginalised communities are 'HIV Confident', i.e., they truly understand HIV, know where to access testing and prevention, and provide sensitive services that do not stigmatise. We deliver training on HIV for staff/volunteers and are promoting the HIV Confident Charter to organisations across our region.
 

Contact details for organisation: