Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been important places for harboring people that live with HIV/AIDS because they feel welcomed and supported to fight for their rights. By studying the experiences of participants of a Brazilian NGO and a Canadian NGO, this study discussed the political participation as a process which is associated with psychosocial factors, historically and culturally contextualized. We could perceive that, in both NGOs, the politicization process of AIDS started from the perspective of helping other people and sharing experiences related to HIV/AIDS, through the analyze of documents, questionnaires and interviews, based on Hermeneutic of Depth by John Thompson (1995). Yet, in the Brazilian NGO the politicization process occurred through a more intense institutional and community dynamics, with the objective of achieving their rights, while the Canadian NGO represents a setting through which the participants individually accessed their rights already consolidated in the country.
Political participation; NGOs/AIDS; psychosocial factors; Human Rights; social vulnerability
