Crusaid

The Crusaid Hardship Fund

The Crusaid Hardship Fund is often the only recourse open to people living in poverty as a result of HIV and AIDS. For many people, ailing health is the only side of HIV infection that they see, but people living with the virus find that it touches parts of their lives that others can’t imagine.
Prejudice and fear mean that people can lose their homes, their jobs and their families. Side effects can mean that people can no longer care for themselves or their dependents.
When HIV is not just about the virus, and becomes the cause of poverty, hardship and misery, Crusaid is there to offer help and hope. Over the fund’s 21 year history it has disbursed more than 40,000 individual grants and supported one third of all people living with HIV in the UK.
Crusaid’s Hardship Fund makes two types of grants:

• To award carefully targeted funding through professional advocacy and welfare bodies to support individuals living with HIV and AIDS and in extreme levels of poverty in the most appropriate way.
• To support professionals within the HIV sector to ensure the limited funds available target and improve the root problems surrounding a persons HIV related poverty.

Crusaid operates two Hardship Funds; the largest fund supporting applicants in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is administrated in the Crusaid office, whilst a second fund supports applicants in Scotland and is administered by Waverly Care in Edinburgh. Both Funds are currently supported through a contracted partnership agreement on a three year basis with Elton John AIDS Foundation and the MAC AIDS Fund.

Crusaid’s Hardship Fund isn’t there to provide people with an income or long-term palliative care. The resources simply don’t exist to make this a possibility.
Rather, Crusaid directs individual pieces of highly-targeted financial assistance to people living in poverty with HIV and AIDS where it can make a real and lasting difference to their situation.

Hardship Fund grants might be made to cover the cost of:

• A fridge to keep medication in
• A washing machine for someone suffering from night sweats
• An increased gas bill for someone experiencing HIV-related pneumonia
• Respite care for children whilst their carer is in hospital

To ensure that the funds are used to lift people from the poverty trap and onto a more stable platform from which to manage their health, every application to Crusaid’s Hardship Fund is made in association with a professional social worker who provides a full needs-based assessment.