Hampshire College

On March 22, 2010, Alice Welbourn, international trainer and activist on issues of sexual, reproductive, and human rights, spoke twice at Hampshire College.

At 10:30 a.m. in Franklin Patterson Hall, room 108, she spoke speak about sexual, reproductive, and human rights issues facing women in Africa.

At 4 p.m. in Franklin Patterson’s east lecture hall, she discussed the power of the Stepping Stones initiative, or how to tackle taboos through the arts to create social action.

Following an HIV-positive diagnosis in 1992, as a personal response to coping with the virus, Dr. Welbourn developed a training package called Stepping Stones. Now widely used across Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and Latin America, Stepping Stones works with issues of gender, generation, HIV, conflict resolution, and communication and relationship skills.

Her 4 p.m. talk will take as its main example the Stepping Stones program created in Uganda. Using theatre, dance, song, storytelling, and drawing, the program enables participants with no formal education to engage with issues in their own lives in creative ways, developing their own strategies for social action.

Dr. Welbourn has worked on international gender, community participation, and health issues for over 25 years. She speaks and writes widely on gender, HIV, and sexual and reproductive rights.

Her Ph.D. at Clare College, Cambridge University, involved research on the social construction of authority in relation to gender, age, and access to material culture and resources in rural Kenya. After working in Somalia for five years, she worked in rural parts of East, Southern, and West Africa, Bangladesh, Haiti, and Ecuador. She has held honorary fellowships at Exeter and Edinburgh Universities and at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Former chair of the International Community of Women living with HIV/AIDS and member of the Leadership Council of the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS, Welbourn sits on the Global Advisory Group for UNESCO for sex, relationships, and HIV education, and the UK Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Network steering committee. She is current chair of SOPHIA, the UK chapter of the Global Colation on Women and AIDS. She advises numerous organizations on global policy in relation to HIV-positive women, including the United Nations, Comic Relief, Diana Fund, and Global Fund on AIDS, TB, and Malaria.