Larry Kessler

Larry Kessler is the Founding Director of the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, an agency that has served over half of all people diagnosed with AIDS in Massachusetts, educated generations about the disease, and secured progressive city, state, and federal AIDS policy.

Kessler was born in 1942 in Pittsburgh, PA. In his time, he has been an ironworker, a small businessman, a seminarian, and a community organizer. In 1960, after high school, he briefly studied for the priesthood before getting involved full-time in social activism through a wide variety of different causes.

Kessler founded and directed Project Appalachia, an anti-poverty program, from 1966-1968. The Meals on Wheels program he started in McKees Rock, Pennsylvania, still operates today. As co-founder and director of Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center from 1970-1973, he took an active role in the civil rights, anti-poverty, and anti-war movements.

Kessler continued his activism at Boston's Paulist Center from 1973-1979, where he expanded the Walk for Hunger into the year-round anti-hunger program, Project Bread. During Boston's desegregation crisis in 1974, Kessler served as a bus monitor to help Boston kids get to school safely.

While running a successful business in 1982, Kessler first heard about the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He and others met at Fenway Community Health Clinic to discuss the crisis, and AAC was created. Kessler became its first employee in 1983, and is now the longest-serving director of any AIDS group in the country.

Kessler served as AAC's Executive Director from 1983 until early 2002, when he moved into the Founding Director's role at the agency.

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