 Action Grant Community Response to End Equalities, shortly CORE, is a reflection of a global aid strategy for 2021-2026. And it's a Homework for the European Union. So the strategy puts the community response in the centre and that's exactly what the CORE does as well. Putting the community response, the communities who are affected the most by three epidemics, HEV, TB and viral hepatitis in the centre. The networking is so important that I'm full of expectations. I'm so excited. This project is very exciting in the sense that it provides an opportunity for community organisation first to have resources. It brings an opportunity to really scale up services for key populations, not only exchange experiences or develop methodologies but really do services. For sure this project will allow us to further develop our services and to really pilot new intervention that we can show to the government that they work and they need to support us. It's fantastic that the European Commission provides this funding because it provides political backing for this kind of initiative. Action Grant CORE focuses on several countries and several member states. So on one hand it focuses on countries in the central Europe which are experiencing backlash in human rights and LGBT rights and specifically who are traditionally low prevalence country but due to the developments and also due to the lack of new scientific developments in HEV response or adopting them by the countries, they're a bit lacking in the HEV response. Another set of countries that CORE focuses on are Western European countries which traditionally are quite successful in their HEV response. However, there are communities that are left behind. Among them sex workers, migrants populations, people who use drugs, they're not part of the overall HEV response in those countries. It's a three-year project starting from January 1st of 2023 and finishing on the 31st December 2025 and includes 24 organizations and one affiliated entity from 16 countries. Among them 14 organizations implementing from 12 countries. It is very important for someone who is working with the community to have the smallest understanding of what it is to be vulnerable. If you want to get tested for free in Romania, you can do it but only in a very short amount of time in the morning. Mornings are usually times when people go to work, go to study or people don't want to wake up in the mornings. So we try to move them in the evenings, which fits more the community. This is the difference between public service and community services. We are thinking about the community, we know the profile of the community and we create services that respond to the need of the community and not only of the people working there. It has been an encourage, an in-current regulation and guidelines. It is very much promoted decentralization of healthcare provision when it comes to HIV, hepatitis, tuberculosis care. There was community settings, these community settings themselves when it comes to working with other healthcare settings are experiencing also stigma and discrimination just by association with the communities they're working with. Over the years I think we have seen that there's a lot of experience and also there's good collaboration between healthcare and the community. There's good collaboration between healthcare providers and communities but even when that exists there are legal and regulatory barriers to decentralized testing and different services for communities. So for instance in some countries you can still not do rapid testing without a medical professional or self-tests are not allowed or for instance PREP provision is still centralizing HIV reference clinic. For the development of community-based and community-led responses one of the main challenges that still we keep on having is criminalization whether it is criminalization of HIV, criminalization of sex work, criminalization of drug use, migration. In Sweden where I work it is well known that the majority of those who test positive they are migrants even if it has been a lot of taboo around it is almost 80%. I suggest that the work the need is in that group and they are not represented enough in our work or HIV resources when the resources are distributed. It's key that migrants take up the challenge because they are part of the solutions so they should be involved because some of the issues that are being addressed in the communities can only be solved by the migrants themselves. So when we talk about breaking taboos I mean it's the better understand their communities so they should be involved. It's very important that sex workers and other marginalized communities are involved in public health responses but we know that's not always the case and there are various factors some of them are due to structural factors such as criminalization, discrimination, stigma as well as poverty for example which really limits the involvement of sex workers in the community response but we also see that there is a lack of appropriate resources and funding for community-led organizations. Trans communities are one of the most affected communities by HIV with the highest numbers of new yearly infections during the past decade. It's not just the fact that we are kicked out from our homes at a very early age we ended up in a state of homelessness quite often and performing or being part of the sex work community also but we're also constantly target of sexual violence and we have very little access to healthcare services and this includes HIV related services. The level of stigma and discrimination against gay population in Romania is quite high it's in the top three categories of people discriminated in Romania which are two of the three are people living with HIV and gay men and this is why people refuse to go to services. What we lack is the governmental support for the time PREP is not available in Cyprus in the national health system of Cyprus moreover there is only one spot one place I mean for people to go and get their medicine for to go and get the care these people are in need and the doctors working for that are very few. The major challenges in Bulgaria in the last five years are the missing services for gay populations entirely missing prevention services support services because all the network that we were able to build with the support of the global fund for like 15 years was unfortunately lost and destroyed due to the permanent lack of funding and political support. If communities are more visible and better heard maybe the situation can change. In some places harm reduction might exist but harm reduction workers might not be able or don't have the capacity to provide services to migrants who use us or migrants that have HIV or people living with HIV with a sexual background so responding to these intersections is one of the important things. The biggest challenge for me I think is data because we do excellent work at community level but you find that you know that has to be backed up by data and if the systems are not set up to capture the data and disaggregate it sometimes it becomes difficult to argue some of these points or to highlight some of the disparities we see in healthcare especially amongst gay populations. The idea in this project is try to harmonize the data collected all the services and try also to improve this data collection covering the gaps that we know that we have with the specific communities, gay populations and try to improve all this process to have these harmonized data, harmonized indicators. It's really important because it's the way the community organizations can show to stakeholders what they are doing and how they are playing a really key role in this progress towards the target of ending HIV and AIDS and STI and viral hepatitis. We have been working on capacity building empowerment which is very important helping the migrants to be able to help themselves not just being pushed around and I believe that collaborating with the other organizations learning from each other having exchange of experiences I mean it could be very very important. Testing new services showing how it can work that the fact that it happens in different countries can serve to convince governments and local health authorities that it's useful to invest in these services and that by like establishing good peer-to-peer services the people who would benefit from these services will have more trust to go and visit these organizations to get what they need. Hopefully we'll build the capacity to train more people and have a bigger team in order to cater more people to have more testing spots and more testing times definitely to be able to provide more tests about other STIs and be more in touch with specific populations needs. We hope with this project that we can further increase the capacities of organizations to collaborate with sex workers organizations to reach out to sex workers and in particular to sex workers who face multiple marginalizations such as migrant sex workers, trans sex workers, sex workers who use drugs etc. Hopefully we will be able to use the core project to increase access to the different trans communities that there is around Europe and Central Asia.