Sinh has been an active participant on the DHRP Steering Committee since 2024. We asked Sinh how has the journey of being a young person from the Community Action Team (CAT) been?
In the beginning participating in a steering committee, I felt like I had no idea. I heard people talk about consortium, and about funding strategy, and I had no idea what they were referring to. It was so difficult for me to understand what they were talking about in the meeting. And it took me many, many meetings to be able to understand.
Over time, I started to learn that after I heard people talking, I had to go and read the documents, the meeting minutes. And now I understand.
Do you currently feel confident to speak your mind and have a voice in that space?
So as I mentioned, in the beginning I did not understand what my role was. I would come to the meetings but I didn’t comprehend what I was expected to do.
But now, after many meetings, and especially with the format of having a preparation meeting before and a debrief meeting afterwards has really helped me. In the preparation meeting we talk to our peers and we feel confident for the official Steering Committee meeting.
It’s really good to have you, or Meg or Maria during the preparation meetings so that we don’t feel stressed, and we have the space to speak so that helps me know what I should say.
Are there things you feel we can improve on?
I remember that in the beginning we didn’t have the preparation meetings, only the Steering Committee meetings, and when we started having these meetings that really helped us a lot. Of course there has also been the barrier of the language, and that is still in place and it’s still difficult to navigate, but we have also learned to use Google translate, so that we can read the documents in our language and we have seen changes like ensuring that the documents to review are shared in advance, so many changes have been made in the process. So in general, I can’t think of anything extra that can be done.
And actually, I wanted to share that in another space that I’m a part of, the CCM [the Country Coordinating Mechanisms are national, multi-stakeholder committees responsible for coordinating, submitting funding proposals for, and overseeing Global Fund grants to fight HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria.], in that space sometimes we have important meetings with people from the Ministry of Health for instance, and we didn’t get any kind of preparation, and that was very overwhelming for us and sometimes we didn’t know what to say and the meetings didn’t feel effective. So, recently, based on this experience that we’ve had in the Steering Committee of DHRP, I suggested in that space that we implement a similar process and they took the advice and we now also have preparation meetings!
That’s really great to hear! And one last question, why do you think it’s important to have the CAT voices in the Steering Committee?
I think it’s very good that there is a representative from each of the countries in the Steer Co, I would just say that maybe one suggestion could be that there we could have chosen two people, in case one person can’t be there that there can always be someone who can attend the meeting, and that they are also as prepared and ready to jump in and support. And I think that having each of us there is living by the principle of nothing about us without us. And how can we have a community project without hearing the voices of the communities? It’s about keeping the principles alive.
