AIDS Policy Project

[wtfimpoz]

How legit do we think they are?  Does anyone know anything about the organization?  I've been searching for an organization which advocates for a cure, and this seems a lot more accessible than amfar or other similar orgs. 

[AIDSPolicyProject]

Hi,

I'm the Executive Director of the AIDS Policy Project. We're a group of longtime, mostly well-known AIDS activists, many of whom started out in ACT UP but now include prevention activists, doctors, lawyers, all kinds. You can check out the "About Us" section of our web site, where we finally got around to uploading our board of directors (at first we didn't list them because we were so teeny). So, our folks include people like John S. James, editor of AIDS Treatment News, and Eric Sawyer, and Rick Loftus, MD (his bio is incorrect--he was a member, not a board member of TAG), Jeff Sheehy, and Laurie Wen and Jose Demarco and Joe Wright, MD. People with AIDS in our group have a very strong voice in making our decisions and our cure project was cofounded by myself and Jose, who is HIV-positive. We have members in Philly, San Francisco and the Bay Area, New York, Boston, and several other cities. We are recruiting, by the way. We launched this cure campaign in early November, 2009. If you'll notice, a lot has happened this year regarding a cure.  Just sayin.

We held the first OPEN town meetings in years on a cure. We have one coming up on November 3 in Los Angeles and one in Philly on November 18. We published the first-ever plain English cure report that was read by leaders at the NIH and a whole lot of other people and even mentioned in a piece on CNN. It's on our web site (www.AIDSPolicyProject.org). We are working with the leading cure researchers in the US and the world.


Because of a six-month campaign of pressure from us, the NIH started tracking for the first time EVER how much it was spending on cure research and has assigned the cure a numerical tracking code. They say that they will now track and report how much they are spending on a cure across the whole NIH. And right now? They are spending 3% of their AIDS research funding on a cure. That doesn't include indirect costs, but neither does the 9x more they are spending on vaccines. Three percent says a lot.

We are grassroots organizers, and you will be hearing a lot more from us on that. Please sign up on our web site if you are interested--we are about to roll something out that will take a lot of people to do. (send an email to: info@AIDSPolicyProject.org and say you want us to send you our activist action kit.). People with AIDS need to stand up and say, WE NEED A CURE--and the community is starting to do so. So when some DC bureaucrat tries to shoot us down ("we don't need a cure for AIDS, the treatments are so great")--and I hear that every day-- we need people to join us and have our back and say NO, keep going--we need a cure. We also need people to download our fact sheets, take them to your support group or ASO or friends and share information about what is going on with the cure.

Legally, we're a project of the Urban Affairs Coalition (uac.org), a 40 year-old umbrella group for small nonprofits based in Philadelphia--though contributions go to us, not them. In other words, if you want to make a contribution, it doesn't go into a big general fund at the UAC, it goes to us minus about 5%. If you are looking them up, they *just* changed their name from the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition. So we are a 501 C-3 nonprofit through them.

As for fundraising, we kick ass as activists but don't have great fundraising skills yet (working hard on). So our campaign is on the cover of POZ, but so far Elton John Foundation won't take our calls.  Color me, at least, slightly bitter about this type of thing. It's only the cure for AIDS and we are focusing just on that and we're really good, in my unbiased opinion. We have only a tiny amount of money and currently are all volunteers. We need money, we need people who can organizing fundraising brunches and cocktail parties and holiday parties and walkathons around the city park for us and TV watching-athons, and we need fundraising advice and introductions to people who might want to help. Or people to just make a donation on our web site or through the mail. We don't know Lady Gaga (though we would like to). But we do know how to make it more likely that there will be a cure, soon.

Also, check out our facebook page: http://tiny.cc/vt38Y 

Sorry to rant, haven't had my coffee yet.

Please feel free to contact me (or really any of us) directly: Kate@AIDSPolicyProject.org

Until a cure is more than a slogan,

Katie Krauss
www.AIDSPolicyProject.org