What Are the Benefits of Networking?

AIDS organizations and people living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs) network because the problems and issues that we face are too large for any of us as individuals or as organizations to face on our own.

Networking is a means of giving greater regional, national or international impacts to the activities of community-based organizations. To use a fashionable term, networks have a “synergy effect.”

“Synergy” means that the total effect of things done together is greater than the sum of individual activities. That is, cooperation between various AIDS organizations gives the groups involved “more.”

Successful networking also helps to:

accomplish something together which you could not accomplish alone;

strengthen advocacy;

influence others - inside and outside the network;

broaden the understanding of an issue or struggle by bringing together different constituencies;

share the work;

reduce duplicating efforts and wasting resources;

promote the exchanges of ideas, insights, experiences and skills;

provide a needed sense of solidarity, and moral and psychological support; and

under certain circumstances, mobilize financial resources.