December 1, 2005

The Promise Keepers: World AIDS Day On Campus

College kids all over the country are taking a break today from studying for finals to write their names on strips of bright-red paper along with a personal promise about fighting AIDS—anything from having safe sex to lobbying Congress. Their scrappy pledges will be looped into a series of giant red chains and delivered to the Washington, DC office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R.-TN) as a reminder of this year’s World AIDS Day theme to “Keep the Promise.”

“We think Frist has the power to make things happen and keep the promise to contribute at least $150 million more this year to the Global Fund,” explains Matthew Kavanagh, 27, national coordinator for the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC), the group behind the paper chain.

World AIDS Day may not be the public attention-getter it once was. But SGAC, founded at Harvard in 2001, is on the case—with events scheduled today at all 85 of its chapters. And the interest is year-round. Every week now, says Kavanagh, he gets e-mail from yet another school hoping to launch a new chapter. Marce Abare, 22, an SGAC senior at the University of North Carolina, reports, “Students still find it difficult to talk about sex and drug use—and how this disease affects us. But awareness is definitely increasing.”

Why the campus surge? “Sure, people want to push Bush,” says Kavanagh, “but I think students are realizing for the first time that this is the crisis of their generation—and that problems in Africa and Asia are their problems too.” Also, a stunning half of all new infections worldwide happen among SGAC peers in the 15-24 age group. And SGAC draws many students who have studied abroad in Africa and returned home with a mission.

Abare, for instance, got involved with the group after a year working in Cape Town, South Africa, with HIV positive children convinced her of the importance of influencing government policy. “We need to take steps to protect ourselves and also fight stigma globally,” she insists calmly. Today, she is setting up phones around her Chapel Hill campus and goading students to call the speaker of the State House about putting a languishing needle exchange bill up for a vote. She vows, “We are going to change perceptions in this community about needle exchange.”

SGAC has been good at thinking creatively enough to grab attention—and then following through when the theatrics are over. The World AIDS Day promise chain isn’t exactly SGAC’s first encounter, for instance, with the famously abstinence-only Senator Frist. In mid-November, DC-area SGAC members visited his office one at a time at ten-minute intervals to hand-deliver coffee in a paper cup—along with a letter calling for Global Fund support and a reminder that 150 people had died of AIDS since the last cup.

Also last month, six SGAC members were arrested in front of the White House while protesting the administration’s AIDS policies with the Campaign to End AIDS (C2EA). Andrew Kohan, 22, a senior at George Washington University in DC who has been an SGAC member since freshman year, was one of the six. As part of a “symbolic” call to “stop the abstinence-only garbage!”  he lay down in the street and didn’t get up when the cops asked him to.

Today, Kohan’s on campus in the GW quad, getting the message out instead to his fellow students by hanging thousands of balloons to represent the number of people who will die from AIDS just this afternoon. He explains, “There are so many angles.”

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