Student Global AIDS Campaign

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. The group is committed to bringing an end to HIV and AIDS in the U.S. and around the world, and uses a wide variety of tactics to achieve its goals, including education on campuses, letter-writing and calling campaigns to decision-makers, public demonstrations, media work, and other activist tactics.

The organization often describes its mission in the shorthand 'Fund the Fight, Treat the People, Drop the Debt, Stop the Spread'. The fuller vision statement is: "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." The campaign has therefore pushed for access to antiretroviral drugs, the elimination of third world debt, reform of global trade rules, and access to condoms.

In February 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 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.

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–Madison, and Williams College. In the spring of 2003, SGAC organized its first national conference (hosted by George Washington University), which was attended by more than 500 students from around the country.

...
Wikipedia