 |
|
|
Register your chapter for another important year of SGAC
Download the Action Kit to get your year started
Mission & Vision
Brief History
Steering Committee
Contact Us
In February of 2001, the Student Global AIDS Campaign and 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. (Global Justice launched the Student Campaign for Child Survival in the fall of 2002 and is currently affiliated with the developing Student Trade Justice Campaign.)
Since its inception the Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC) has been a student-led organization. Adam Taylor, the original executive director and the co-founder of Global Justice, was SGAC’s only full-time staff member until the summer of 2003. Starting in August, SGAC will share a full-time national coordinator (Sara Renn, a former SGACer from the University of Louisville) who will work with an array of interns in the national Global Justice office.
SGAC is led by a student steering committee that is elected by SGAC chapters each year. SGAC’s steering committee has evolved with the organization and the positions and teams have changed along the way.
Trainings and conferences have formed the backbone of SGACs outreach and capacity building since the organization’s founding. 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.
After its first two years, SGAC had reached a size where it could no longer operate smoothly with only one full-time staff member (Adam). Having received a grant from the Gates Foundation, SGAC was able to hire a national organizer, a Midwest organizer, and a managing director (for Global Justice) in June of 2003. Later that summer, SGAC also hired a policy coordinator (whom it shared with the Student Campaign for Child Survival).
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.
Some of SGACers favorite actions and campaigns have been Kick Coke of Campus (where 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), and 04.Stop.AIDS (a loose network of HIV and AIDS activists, many of them SGACers, who go to presidential candidates events to ask them pointed questions about HIV and 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.
Fall of 2005 brought a new National Organizer for SGAC, Matt Kavanagh, and a successful campaign to increase funding for the Global Fund by $100 million beyond the President's request. The effort was marked by creative, media-generating tactics, like coffee delivered to Senate leaders to wake them up to the AIDS crisis, and a chain of promises made by students on World AIDS Day.
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. Though there have been some major concessions from Gilead Sciences and Abbott Laboratories, the work continues.
 |
||
|
 
|
|
|
||