The Reverend Canon Gideon Byamugisha is an Anglican priest in Uganda with a parish outside of Kampala. In 1992, he became the first religious leader in Africa to publicly announce that he was HIV positive. In 2009, Gideon received the 26th annual Niwano Peace Prize “In recognition of his works to uphold the dignity and human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS”.

The Friends of Canon Gideon Foundation runs a technical training school—Hope Institute—that provides holistic education to very low income young adults 15-25 who have been orphaned by or negatively affected in some way by the AIDS epidemic in Uganda. The Hope Institute is a youth training and empowerment institution which has supported, trained, and graduated over 900 youths in the Orphaned and Vulnerable Category in various vocational courses. The Institute has helped these youths become productively employed, gainfully skilled, HIV/AIDS competent, spiritually empowered, and socially and environmentally aware leaders in their families and communities.

The organization’s founder, Rev. Canon Gideon Byamugisha was tapped by Dr. Amy Patterson to come to campus to teach as the Sewanee Brown Faculty Fellow in the fall of 2013, and this initial contact has developed into a partnership between FOCAFIGO and the College to provide opportunities for Sewanee students to serve and learn from the students and staff of FOCAGIFO. Fourteen Sewanee students have interned at FOCAGIFO over the last four summers, assisting in building organizational capacity to deliver health, education, economic development and communication services and programming to Hope Institute students, and residents in the surrounding community. This year, Peter Bahr and Taylor Sprouse will spend 8 weeks working directly to plan and teach lessons to the students at Hope Institute. (Students are 16-25 years old.) We will teach on topics such as leadership, public speaking, English practice (conversational and writing), and health education.

Find out more about the Hope Institute here: https://www.focagifo.com/projects/hope-institute/