In February 1990 a group of people living with HIV/AIDS met for the first time at the North Staffordshire Health Promotion Unit. This first meeting of what became known as Body Positive North Midlands was attended by just a handful of people living with HIV/AIDS and a couple of their friends and carers. The foundations laid by the Body Positive self help group enabled the launch of Staffordshire Buddies in 1993. Since that time Staffordshire Buddies has grown to be a respected local Charity providing services to over four hundred people living with or affected by HIV and undertaking sexual health promotion with thousands of local people in the communities most at risk. Twenty years on we wish to gratefully acknowledge the work of the brave few who laid the foundations for our services. We hope that those who are still around today will be proud of what we have achieved and that those who we lost along the way will always be fondly remembered.

Welcome to Staffordshire Buddies "Online".

Staffordshire Buddies is the HIV Charity for Stoke and Staffordshire. The mission of the Charity is to reduce the impact of HIV through providing support, information, advocacy and advice to those living with, or affected by, the virus, and by undertaking health promotion support to communities at risk.

The purpose of this site is to inform people about our services and provide a starting point for service users to 'surf' for useful information. This site also contains the "online" version of our current and past Newsletters.

We hope you enjoy your visit to our site.  Please contact us if you have any comments or suggestions as to how we can improve it.

Our History

Staffordshire Buddies was established in 1993 and became a registered charity in 1995. The remarkable history of the early years of the charity have been chronicled in a book which you can download free from our publications page (click here)