From Frustration to Power: Reconstructing a Culture of Community Organizing in the Third Decade of the Epidemic in the United States

Julie Davids

Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP)

Providence, RI

(Estados Unidos)

The United States HIV/AIDS movement was unprecedented in that nation’s political and cultural landscape, in its capacity to challenge misconceptions and articulate the rights of people living with HIV; its insistence on strategic research and accountable, community-based care; and in securing public funding for treatment, care and prevention. It also expanded cultural space for gay men and lesbians while creating a hybrid community of liberationists, middle-class urban professionals, artists, sex workers, radical organizers and others. However, the movement has contracted and calcified in recent years.

The sector created through the early response has experienced institutionalization – aided by demobilization strategies promoted by local, state and federal government -- even as many of the “first responders” from our community have succumbed to the disease, become entrenched in service delivery, or have left the movement. Efforts to sustain the AIDS service infrastructure have become nearly the sole focus of advocacy, and these efforts have fragmented as funds have not expanded to meet needs and competition between groups, regions and constituencies have increased. Investment in community organizing that puts power in the hands of low-income, marginalized and/or people of color most likely to be living with HIV today has never been on the top of the list of the service sector. But the need for community mobilization is clear.

Promising tools against HIV are threatened by powerful conservative opposition or lack of a vocal constituency for these measures, and both health care systems and community efforts that are the backbone of AIDS work are threatened by major cuts and restrictions. HIV prevention advocacy has been and remains a low priority that requires concrete, explicit and just work regarding sex and drugs, including issues of reproductive health, LGBT and gender bias, harm reduction, racial discrimination, sex work, and criminal justice. These issues lack well-funded interests, can be further marginalized in a medicalized AIDS movement and that are a lightning rod for right-wing forces.

The Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), founded in 2003, is a strategic and focused initiative overcoming these problems, dedicated to establishing, training and mobilizing an independent and powerful HIV/AIDS movement in the United States and ensuring development of a broad, effective range of HIV prevention options in the next decade. To do so, we are crafting a specific and effective movement that functions as a vibrant social network exposing the intersection of issues of sexuality, gender, reproductive health and rights, directly confronting the barriers to developing a broader range of HIV prevention options while vigorously demanding a sound health care system that addresses disparities that leave many vulnerable to HIV. Our strategies include: the merger of training and campaigning; the nurturance of a social network using new technologies and old-fashioned grassroots activism; ground-up organizing in AIDS organizations that inspires and links frustrated workers; media efforts; and cross-movement alliances between generations of activists and issue areas in gender, racial justice, sexuality, health, and human rights. We would be honored to discuss the CHAMP model in a panel or workshop on AIDS activism or organizing.

About Julie Davids

Julie Davids is the Executive Director of the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), a national HIV/AIDS grassroots policy, organizing and training organization based in Providence RI. Since joining ACT UP Philadelphia in 1990, Davids has been a committed AIDS activist, focusing on cross-constituency organizing that links research, policy work and mobilization. She was a founding member and community organizer with Health GAP (Global Access Project), a core coalition on global treatment activism, and was the Director of Project TEACH (Treatment Education Activists Combating HIV) as well as Interim Director of the Critical Path AIDS Project. She is co-founder of the International Rectal Microbicide Working Group, and past co-chair of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership.