The Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) is an advocacy group with more than 85 chapters at high schools, colleges, and universities across the United States committed to bringing an end to HIV and AIDS in the U.S. and around the world. The group uses a wide variety of tactics to acheive its goals including education on campuses, letter-writing and calling campaigns to decision-makers, public demonstrations, media work, and other activist tactics. Human immunodeficiency virus (commonly known as HIV, and formerly known as HTLV-III and lymphadenopathy-associated virus[1][2]) is a retrovirus that is the cause of the disease known as AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome), a syndrome where the immune system begins to fail, leading to many life-threatening opportunistic... Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS or Aids) is a collection of symptoms and infections in humans resulting from the specific damage to the immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). ...

Focuses & Mission

The organization often describes its mission in the short hand: Fund the Fight, Treat the People, Drop the Debt, Stop the Spread. The fuller vision statement states: "We envision a world in which AIDS is no longer a death sentence, in which economics and geography do not determine access to life-saving drugs, and where every woman, man, and child has the knowledge, means, and rights to protect her- or himself from infection." As such, the campaign has pushed for access to antiretroviral drugs, the elimination of third world debt, reform of global trade rules, and access to condoms. Antiretroviral drugs are medications for the treatment of infection by the retrovirus HIV. Different antiretroviral drugs act at various stages of the HIV life cycle. ... Third World debt is external debt incurred by Third World countries. ... A standard latex condom still rolled up This article is about the contraceptive device. ...

Major Events & Recent Successes

• "Kick Coke Off Campus": SGAC joined with other AIDS activists to pressure Coca-Cola to treat its HIV+ workers in its African bottling plants
• Bake Sale for the Global Fund: where SGACers sold brownies for $1 billion in front of representatives and senators offices to try to raise the money Congress wasn’t giving to the Global Fund
• 04.Stop.AIDS: a loose network of HIV and AIDS activists, many of them SGACers, who went to presidential candidates events and asked pointed questions until every democratic candidate adopted a progressive platform on global AIDS (President George W. Bush refused to talk with the activists or allow them into events)
• Student March Against AIDS: on February 26, 2005, SGAC held the second largest HIV and AIDS mobilization in U.S. history. More than 4,000 students and young people from around the country ralied together in DC for the Student March Against AIDS.
• Gilead Sciences Corporate Campaign: in spring 2006, SGAC took on its second corporate campaign, this time targetting the marketers of second-line AIDS drugs who had failed to make those medicines accessible to lower and middle income countries. The company Gilead Sciences eventually made major consessions to make its drug Tenofovir more available and allow generic competition.
• In the fall of 2006, SGAC began an expanded campaign focused on pushing for Universal Access to AIDS Treatment by the year 2010.

The wave shape (known as the dynamic ribbon device) present on all Coca-Cola cans throughout the world derives from the contour of the original Coca-Cola bottles. ... Tuberculous lungs The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is a UN-related organization whose purpose is to finance programs that purport to prevent and treat patients with AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, three major threats to health on a global scale. ... The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, the other being the Republican Party. ... Gilead Sciences NASDAQ: GILD is a biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops and commercializes therapeutics to advance the care of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases, principally HIV, hepatitis B and influenza. ... Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate belongs to a class of antiretroviral drugs known as nucleotide analogue reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NtRTIs), which block reverse transcriptase, an enzyme crucial to viral production in HIV-infected people. ...

History & Founding

In February of 2001, the Student Global AIDS Campaign and its parent organization, Global Justice, were founded simultaneously by students at Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government who saw the untapped potential of students to advocate for political and social change on global HIV and AIDS and other issues of global justice. Global Justice became officially incorporated as a 501 (c)(3) organization, with the Student Global AIDS Campaign as its first campaign. Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... John F. Kennedy School of Government The John F. Kennedy School of Government is a public policy school and one of the graduate schools of Harvard University. ...

The first conference was a New England regional conference hosted by Harvard in the fall of 2001. That spring and the next fall regional conferences were also held at Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, and Williams College. In the spring of 2003, SGAC organized its first national conference (hosted by the George Washington University) and drew more than 500 students from around the country.

As SGAC’s chapter base has grown so has its capacity to do effective advocacy. SGAC’s first large rally was held in Boston in the spring of 2002 to demand that Senator Kerry (who had declared himself the Senate AIDS leader) significantly increase the amount of funding for the Global Fund in the bill he was writing. More than 800 students from around the Northeast and East coast rallied on that cold, disgusting April day. This article is 79 kilobytes or more in size. ...

Structure

SGAC is a youth- and student-led organization organized into chapters based at high schools or universities that are the grassroots or the organization. There is a national Steering Committee (SC) of students from across the country. Elected by SGAC members for one-year terms, SC members deal with the day to day operation of the campaign and fill roles ranging from media coordination to outreach work. Decisions are made through consensus process.

Global Justice

The Student Global AIDS Campaign is housed within a larger NGO called Global Justice which is also home to other student-led campaigns on global trade and child survival. Global Justice also employs the staff that work on the Student Global AIDS Campaign--which includes a full time national organizer and a shared executive director and support/communications staff. Global Justice is governed by a board of directors that has included activists and intellectuals including Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Farmer, and ACT UP co-founder Eric Sawyer as well as students from each of the group's campaigns. There is also an emerging alumni group of previous leaders who have now graduated. Jeffrey Sachs Jeffrey David Sachs (born November 5, 1954 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American economist known for his work as an economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa. ... Dr. Paul Farmer (born October 26, 1959) is an American professor and physician, currently the Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University and an attending physician at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. ... ACT UP, or the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, is a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals . ...

External links

• Student Global AIDS Campaign
• Global Justice

Category: AIDS activism Category: HIV/AIDS Category: Civic and political organizations