FOTAC - Trustees and Officers
Nigel Taylor (FoTAC Coordinator)
British-born Nigel Taylor has worked in relation to international development in Africa since the early 1980s. He worked for Oxfam GB for more than twelve years, finishing as Country Representative in South Africa from 1996-2003. During that period he saw the impact of AIDS amongst his friends, the consequences of President Mbeki's misguided policies, and was first impressed by TAC's activism and commitment. Having held the post of Head of Public Policy for the international NGO Tearfund, Nigel worked as a freelance consultant for five years, focussing on strengthening the response to AIDS. He provided strategic and organizational development support to NGOs, and engaged in policy development and research particularly to strengthen the contribution of community and faith groups. A Comic Relief investment grant for FoTAC and TAC enabled FoTAC to employ Nigel as Coordinator in mid-2010. In this role he provides technical support to TAC, pursues other institutional funding and contributes to advocacy for more effective international efforts to address the AIDS pandemic.
Andrew Feinstein (Chair)
Andrew was an ANC Member of Parliament in South Africa for 8 years. He resigned from Parliament in late 2001 in protest at the ANC's refusal to allow an unfettered investigation into a multi-billion rand arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption. Andrew is the author of "After the Party" a best-selling political memoir and his book on the global arms trade, "The Shadow World" will be published by Penguin in late 2011. He writes and lectures on politics and economics, the arms trade, corruption and governance. Andrew is the Chair of FOTAC.
Tessa Lewin (Deputy Chair)
Tessa is a Southern African researcher, trainer, artist and animator, based in the UK. Tessa is particularly interested in the intersect between art and social science and in cross-disciplinary work that tries to engage with issues of social justice. She has worked with Help the Aged (Zimbabwe), The National Language Project (South Africa), Rockefeller Foundation (East Africa), Channel 4 and The Guardian (UK), on projects that combine art, research and advocacy. She previously ran the Digital Arts programme at Lighthouse in Brighton, and is currently managing the communications for the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC, based at the Institute of Development Studies. She is a leading innovator in the field of the use of diverse audio-visual technologies in development research.
Alastair Constance (Treasurer)
Alastair grew up in Johannesburg and studied his bachelor's degree at Goldsmiths College in London where he has lived for the last twelve years. Alastair is the founder and managing director of Ethical Currency, the world's first foreign exchange broker to voluntarily pay the Currency Transaction Levy (a form of Tobin Tax). Alastair is Treasurer of the Friends of the Treatment Action Campaign.
Chris Woods (Secretary)
British-born Chris Woods is a freelance journalist and documentary director, who spent a decade working for flagship BBC programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight. He has a longstanding interest in the HIV/ AIDS crisis, and has been engaged with HIV in South Africa since 1994. He filmed early efforts by South African activists to secure patent-free combination drugs, and helped uncover untruthful claims about condoms by the Vatican, claims which have had a significant detrimental impact in parts of Africa.
Oliver Phillips
Oliver grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa but is currently a Reader in Law at the University of Westminster (London, England), where he is also the Law School Research Director. He has a Bachelor's degree in law and politics from the University of Cape Town, and a PhD in Criminology from the University of Cambridge. His PhD dissertation focussed on homosexuality and the law in Zimbabwe; since then he has written extensively on sexuality, human rights and the law in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He has also been a Rockefeller Fellow at the Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights, at Columbia University, New York, U.S.A, and has taught at the Universities of London, Amsterdam and Keele. Oliver was one of the founders of GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe) and from 2002-2009 he was Deputy Chair of the Britain-Zimbabwe Society (www.britain-zimbabwe.org.uk). At present, he serves as an expert witness in relation to applications for asylum made by Zimbabweans in the UK, and is on the boards of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (www.iglhrc.org), and the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO - www.homophobiaday.org). He returns regularly to Southern Africa where he is a guest lecturer at the Southern and Eastern African Resource Centre for Women's Law (SEARCWL) based at the University of Zimbabwe.
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Anton Kerr
Anton has been involved in international AIDS activism for more than ten years. He worked for Christian Aid and is now Head of Policy at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, which supports community responses to AIDS across more than thirty countries. He is Chair of the Commonwealth HIV/AIDS Action Group (CHAAG) and a Board member of the UK Consortium on AIDS and international development.
Asuka Leslie
Asuka Leslie is training in Public Health Medicine and holds an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship, based within the Health Protection Agency and Department of Infection & Population Health, University College London. After training in medicine at the University of London, she worked as a Study Physician for Emory University's Rwanda/Zambia HIV Research Group at their HIV clinical trial site in Kigali, which houses a prospective cohort study of over 900 HIV serodiscordant couples. She went on to work for Family Health International, focusing on research capacity-building of local institutions and family planning study protocol development. She was co-writer on a successful bid for a CDC grant of $13 million for interventions targeted at populations at high-risk for HIV. She is currently completing an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where her thesis will explore the risks and consequences of sexual coercion among female adolescents in urban Zimbabwe.
Rachel Holmes
Rachel Holmes is an HIV treatment activist, writer and journalist. Her most recent book, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Times of Saartjie Baartman, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. She is currently writing a life of Eleanor Marx. Formerly an academic holding lectureships at the Universities of London and Sussex, Rachel left academia to work for Amazon.co.uk for five years. Rachel is now Head of Literature and the Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre, London, and is a founder member and Trustee of WRITERS BLOC, an organisation of senior writers and journalists who write articles on education as an advocacy tool to raise public awareness and influence state policies on global education issues.
