Students FACE AIDS - And Succeed

Stanford students created an HIV support group, helping dozens in only a few months.

By Vilas Rao and Josh Weiner, Stanford University
Wednesday July 5, 2006

I first heard about the beaded pins last August. I didn’t know then that they would soon be worn on shirts, pants, bags —virtually unavoidable on Stanford’s campus.

These pins were not the latest in California fashion, but the latest innovation in humanitarian entrepreneurship, aimed at raising AIDS awareness and money at our nation’s universities.

Just nine months ago, FACE AIDS was only an idea being hatched by three students on a porch in rural Zambia. Three Stanford students, inspired by the month and a half they spent volunteering in Mwange Refugee Camp, decided to take a leave of absence from school to turn their idea into reality.

That idea was a student campaign to raise $1 million to fight AIDS in Africa. One student, Katie Bollbach, would work with HIV/AIDS support groups in Zambia to make beaded AIDS awareness pins, simultaneously helping participants and their families live with the disease and producing a fundraising and awareness tool to be used in the U.S. campaign. The other two, Lauren Young and Jonny Dorsey, returned to the U.S. to manage the campaign and raise money to support it.

Today, 30 people in Zambia have benefited from FACE AIDS’ support groups. The income they have earned has helped lift their families out of extreme poverty, enabling them to buy more nutritious food and medicine, giving their children the opportunity to stay in school, and empowering them to live with dignity and respect.

FACE AIDS has raised almost $50,000 to fund its 2006 campaign and is currently working with student groups at 14 other California campuses. One of the key components of its business plan is to solicit challenge grants from corporations, foundations, and individuals to match student donations for AIDS awareness pins. At Stanford, student donations for pins were matched dollar-for-dollar by Sterling Stamos Capital Management, current gubernatorial candidate Steve Westly, and a group of local donors made of up Mr. William Headapohl, Dr. Warren King, and Mr. Tad Taube. For every $5 donated, these matching partners contribute an additional $15 in aid to the health care nonprofit Partners in Health.

The FACE AIDS campaign at Stanford kicked off on April 10, 2006, distributing pins and organizing a week of performances, speaker panels, film screenings, and fundraising tournaments and working with groups ranging from the AIDS Leadership Initiative to fraternities. This coalition of groups distributed 500 pins in three days and released a second wave of pins on the fourth day of the campaign. After finding an additional anonymous patching partner for Stanford, FACE AIDS and all of the Stanford students who participated in the campaign raised $12,000 in a week. The Stanford campaign was the first of 10 campaigns in California that FACE AIDS ran this spring.

This fall, FACE AIDS is expanding to 100 schools across the country. As members of the FACE AIDS group at Stanford we work with leaders at different campuses by providing them with educational resources developed by students for a student audience, the pins, and the support of our team at Stanford and a network of student AIDS activists across the country. Campus leaders of FACE AIDS campaigns use innovation, energy, and familiarity with their campuses to design and implement their own fundraising and awareness campaigns.

All of the money raised through the 2006 campus campaigns will support Partners in Health, an organization founded by Paul Farmer that recently opened a comprehensive care clinic in rural Rwanda.

Paul Farmer founded Partners in Health when he was a medical student, inspired by his first trip to Haiti as an undergraduate. It is proof that students have the power to shape the world. By funding Partners in Health, FACE AIDS will help treat thousands of Rwandans with HIV/AIDS in 2006. But more importantly, they will do it by engaging tens of thousands of students in the U.S. in a new way of thinking about our responsibility and ability to treat people for HIV/AIDS in Africa.

It only costs $240 to treat an HIV-positive individual with ARVs (antiretrovirals) for an entire year, extending his or her life up to five times what it otherwise would have been. But the effects of treatment extend beyond the just the patient’s health, by protecting entire families from downward spirals to poverty and disease. Almost five million people in sub-Saharan Africa need ARVs, and only 10 percent of them have access to that life-saving medicine. With 15 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, in the words of Kofi Annan, "How many more do we have to get, to wake up?"

FACE AIDS is challenging our generation to wake up and take responsibility in fighting AIDS in the developing world. FACE AIDS campaigns will inspire the leaders of the future to continue to fight this heartbreaking pandemic through charity, policy, and leadership. Leading development expert Jeffrey Sachs recently praised the organization: "FACE AIDS has it just right: these problems are solvable, and this is the generation to solve them.”

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in the Stanford Progressive, a Campus Progress sponsored publication.

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Comments

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   If I can be of any help please contact at this e-mail address
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   Sincerely yours,

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