This World Café will explore youth living with HIV. Discussions will focus on access, trust, stigma, digital spaces, and intersecting barriers. Participants will also examine gaps in care, transitions between systems, and what it means for youth to thrive. The sessions will identify missing perspectives in research and priority areas for change. Findings will help inform future research, programs, and policies through a policy brief we will create based on the inputs from participants.

Reclaim lived experience as expertise and challenge traditional ideas of knowledge and credentials. Participants create portrait cards and/or short video statements.

Building on the launch of the U=U Youth Manifesto, this interactive workshop brings together the young leaders championing the movement to share practical advocacy tools, real-world experiences and strategies for action. Participants will explore how youth leadership can help expand awareness of U=U, tackle stigma and accelerate equitable access globally.

Drawing on the experiences of the READY+ programme, this interactive workshop explores how young people are responding to the interconnected challenges of HIV and climate change through community leadership, advocacy and peer support. Participants will exchange ideas and identify practical actions to strengthen climate resilience and create healthier, more supportive communities for young people living with and affected by HIV.

We piece together our own mosaic tiles using traditional Brazilian techniques, working side by side to build something collective out of individual fragments. A local HIV activist joins the session to share their story and ground the workshop in the realities of living with HIV in Brazil today. Each finished tile becomes part of a larger piece, a visual reminder that resistance and community are built the same way: piece by piece, together.

Este painel aborda a crise climática a partir do racismo ambiental, da justiça territorial e das determinantes sociais da saúde. Discute-se como os eventos climáticos extremos e a degradação dos territórios impactam a saúde do trabalhador, a subsistência e a qualidade de vida de populações vulnerabilizadas — como povos originários, comunidades ribeirinhas do Alto Solimões e jovens vivendo com HIV/AIDS (PVHA) em situações de vulnerabilidade social.

This Bridge Must Not Break: young survivor peer educators and the case for funding the people who carry HIV prevention

The session opens with a problem hiding in plain sight. In our study across 10 sites in Nigeria, 51% of survivor peer educators exited within two months. Only 32% stayed six months. These are mostly young people, carrying testing, treatment linkage, and violence disclosure for communities the formal system will not touch, including young trans people who have been removed from Nigeria's national HIV surveillance entirely.

We'll share what our peer educators told us about why they leave, then walk through the Protection and Power Package we built and piloted in our safe houses: fair pay, protection, psychosocial support, and decision space. We close with a concrete ask, making peer educator retention a tracked indicator in HIV programming, and open the floor.

The session is for young peer educators and advocates, programme implementers, and funders. It's relevant to Youth Force because peer educator burnout is a youth issue. The people the HIV response recruits, burns through, and replaces are overwhelmingly young. This session is about keeping them.

Format: 10-minute presentation plus discussion. Can be delivered in English or Nigerian Pidgin.

Participants co-design community-led HIV programs, research, policies, or interventions that centre lived experience and community leadership.