On the 20th December 2005, the Big Lottery Fund announced that Project HOPE UK had been awarded a grant towards a 4 year project called “Mitigating the spread and impact of HIV/AIDS in the Russian Federation through an integrated health and education life skills based project”.

The aim of the project is to “empower at least 38,000 vocational students and their families and peer group to adopt behaviour change strategies to prevent the spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS and to use this knowledge to seek appropriate health care”  This will be achieved by integrating the Federal approved Project HOPE Useful Practice: Real Alternatives HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum with a training programme for health care providers: school nurses, local and regional STI/AIDS and Family Planning clinics and local health NGOs on how to communicate with adolescents about STIs & HIV/AIDS.  The project began in April 2006  in the Irkutsk, Orenburg, Saratov and Inanovo regions and will be extended to a further 11 regions throughout the Russian Federation in the next three years.