It was the gay community that joined forces to set up AIDES, and it was to this community that the founder Chairman of AIDES spoke in his letter of 25 September 1984, even though it was not a question at the outset of creating an association specifically for gays. Anyway, we have inherited the approach of these mobilised communities.

As the epidemic grows, communities are mobilised as much within AIDES as outside it. But we are still strongly attached to a community approach, in other words working with these mobilised communities to find the best ways of fighting AIDS as far as they are concerned.

We need to repeat the words of the last sentence in Daniel Defert’s letter founding AIDES: “… I suggest we set up a centre for discussion, solidarity and transformation, do we have the will to create such a place?”.

Mobilisation, and its initial community-based version, was thus given a job to do: to transform the living conditions of the people facing the epidemic.

It was not just a question of giving each other support, being together and speaking out strongly at a  time when people knew little or nothing about HIV/AIDS.

It was a case of using our words, our solidarity and our collective experience of the difficulties to bring about a social transformation, changing the whole situation for the people involved and for the epidemic itself.

As well as being an association based on the community approach, AIDES sees herself as a “non-government association”.

This does not mean that it is against the Government or that it is not in contact with it. Quite the contrary, AIDES is “non-government” because what it offers meets a need that we believe should be met by government policy.

We help to ensure that innovative answers emerge from government policy, even if we have to carry out these actions ourselves on an experimental basis, in the hope that our experiments will prove useful to the extent that they become part of overall government policy.

It is then up to the government to run these initiatives themselves or have them run by associations (which are then no longer non-government organisations like AIDES) or their own departments.

Ethical principles involve respect for people’s identity, integrity and rights.

AIDES is strongly supportive of identity and a non-judgemental approach, and is committed to respecting people’s cultural identity, sexuality, lifestyle, ideological views and/or decisions about treatment.

AIDES is independent of all religious, moral, political or scientific groups.

AIDES undertakes to abide by an obligation of confidentiality and anonymity towards anyone inside or outside the association.