WHAT IS THE LOVE TANK?
The Love Tank is a not-for-profit community interest company (CIC) that promotes health & wellbeing of under served communities through education, community building, research, events, and communication + design.
We do this by creating evidence-driven programmes and interventions by and with the communities we’re from including queer people, migrants, people of colour, sex workers, and other underserved groups.
The Love Tank is a lived experience organisation run by a small London-based team with a unique mix of community advocacy, public health, health promotion, harm reduction, capacity building, and equalities expertise.
OUR STORY
2018
after 3 years of educating and agitating for PrEP access, the team behind PrEPster establishes The Love Tank, a non-profit community-interest company to house and hold PrEPster and other emerging work; at the Amsterdam International Aids conference we record and produce 50 PrEP Works! videos with PrEP activists from around the world - the videos go on to win the Best Video Series in the Poz Awards; we end the conference by co-hosting a community PrEP event Host in Amsterdam’s most notorious kink club; and we build solidarity networks with PrEP activists in Lebanon and Ukraine, developing the beginning of a global network of PrEP users and activists.
2019
taking the model used for PrEP, we launch Long Time No Syphilis, with the programme available in nine different languages; for Valentine's Day we launch Date PrEP - a short video promoting PrEP to the UK’s Black communities - a video, with a beautiful twist at the end!; our work at UK Black Pride results in major shifts in the numbers of Black gay men using the Sexual Health London service; and in autumn we dive deep into basements of east London to launch the Love Hub as part of Fringe! Film Festival.
2020
as the world closes down we launch a Sex & the Coronavirus comic series with friends in NYC; we redouble our efforts to promote PrEP to women by launching our Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves programme of work; we continue our annual PrEP user survey - positioning The Love Tank as a community based research organisation; and we end the year by celebrating PrEP becoming available on the NHS in England (finally!).
2021
we tackle health inequalities head-on with our Black Health Matters programme; hundreds of Queer Migrant Men in London engage with our outreach programme, telling us about the impact of the ‘hostile environment’ and the need for supportive community building; QueerHealth provides a new web-portal to engage with everything from harm-reduction, to creating new queer spaces; the pilot Ask Me About PrEP programme trains over 100 PrEP peer mobilisers - who reach more than 10,000 people through conversations, workshops and media posts; and, at the end of the year, we take a seat on a very special sofa and launch Second Tuesday Monologues.
2022
with our communities facing a new health crisis we step-up to the forefront of the community response to MPOX: within 18 months we’ve worked with NHS staff to provide over 800 vaccines to eligible underserved people in London; BEAU magazine - from the beautiful HIV+ community - respositions the narratives of what it is to be a queer man with HIV in London; after a two-year enforced COVID break we return to the heart of Glastonbury Festival, providing PrEP info to 6000 people at NYC Downlow - the festival’s infamous queer quarter; we close the year by calling out the lack of progress in PrEP in England’s PrEP provision in the Not Prepared report.
2023
our new Little Back Pocket Guide series provides multilingual chill-out harm reduction info, as well as information for people seeking gender affirming hormones; after a one year pilot our MAUREEN programme is awarded three years of funding to continue building community with queer migrant men and queer men of colour; the podcast from MAUREEN phase 1 - Queer Roots and Routes - wins an accolade at the Independent Podcast Awards; Queers Beyond Borders - a brand new programme of work that affirms the assets brought by queer migrants into and across Europe is launched; and based on community evidence generation, we produce new guides on steroid harm reduction, and on DoxyPEP.
2024
we continue to shout-out about PrEP inequity with the launch of our new HIV PrEP community research; we pilot a peer-based needle exchange programme for trans people who are using hormones; our pilot programme with Grindr4Equality and Sexual Health London demonstrates the reach of the programme to queer men of colour.