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Leveraging the Power of Local Community Organizations around the World

In 1983, the Levi Strauss Foundation became the first U.S. corporate foundation to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since then, we have evolved our strategies, adapted lessons, and pioneered new approaches to address the changing face of what has become a global epidemic. The Company and Foundation have contributed more than $40 million in grants to HIV/AIDS service organizations in more than 40 countries.

Early funding focused on building grassroots AIDS service organizations from the ground up, particularly in our San Francisco headquarters community and later in communities surrounding our factories throughout the United States. In the 1990s, the Company and Foundation began shifting attention to the international front, supporting prevention programs and educational campaigns targeting vulnerable populations -- particularly women and youth.

Since 2000, through our workers’ rights grants program, the Company and Foundation have accelerated efforts to extend critical HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, treatment and care to factory workers in the apparel sector – two-thirds of whom are women. To date, these programs have reached apparel workers in ten countries across three continents. In China, capacity and coalition building of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the Pearl River Delta region have brought critical HIV prevention information and counseling to more than 250,000 migrant women workers.

More than two decades into the battle against the epidemic, it is clear that improving access to HIV/AIDS education, treatment and care requires an unrelenting focus on social change. Through its grant partnerships, the Foundation’s current efforts focus on eradicating the stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV and those who are most vulnerable to infection.

The Foundation supports policy advocacy, law reform and other efforts to ensure that people living with HIV/AIDS are treated with dignity and respect and access critical services. Some examples:

• The Syringe Access Fund:-- A collaboration of five national foundations including the Levi Strauss Foundation, the Syringe Access Fund is a five-year grant making initiative that strives to reduce the risk of HIV infection in the U.S. and Puerto Rico through expanded access to sterile syringes among injection drug users. In total, it is anticipated that more than $6 million in grant funds will be distributed by the Fund.
• "Get Screened Oakland: -- a public/private collaboration created by the Foundation, the city of Oakland, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and others to encourage the public to know their HIV status. This city-wide approach to HIV screening and prevention in highly vulnerable communities is now recognized as a national model in this arena.
• Legal aid and policy advocacy efforts to address discrimination on the basis of HIV/AIDS status in Canada, China, India, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States.
• Cutting-edge efforts to build the advocacy capacity of communities around the world who bear the brunt of HIV/AIDS stigma and discrimination, including injecting drug users and gay men.

Levi Strauss & Co. also supports NGOs on the cutting edge of business change, funding, for example, the Apparel Lesotho Alliance to Fight AIDS (ALAFA), a first-of-its-kind NGO whose model to comprehensively address HIV/AIDS in factory settings is quickly becoming a best practice in supply chain engagement.