GCC World AIDS Day Event

Global Citizen Corps leaders gathered to make some noise on Sunday, December 6th in Portland ,OR. With live music, facts and figures hanging from red balloons and a lot of energy they joined together to build awareness about the global AIDS Pandemic.

Last year 2.7 people became infected worldwide, half of which were young people between the ages of 15 and 24. That breaks down to nearly 6,000 people under 25 infected each day.

Now 33 million people around the world are living with HIV/AIDS and women account for 50 percent of those cases. Although the pandemic is worldwide, Sub-Saharan Africa has been hardest hit—the area accounts for around 10% of the world’s population but it accounts for 67% of all people living with HIV/AIDS.

Due to slightly increased access to improving drugs, the number of people living with HIV/AIDS has risen. Despite this around 2 million people still died of the disease in 2008.

All these scary statistics hung from the red balloons just above visitors’ heads at the Action Center in Portland to help people understand the realities of the AIDS pandemic.

Created with flickr slideshow.

Don't Stop Believing

You know how certain songs can take you back to another time and place? For Global Citizen Corp leader Casey Drobnick the song “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey transports her back to one of her first experiences with the Global Citizen Corps community.

Casey had spent a summer in the Dominican Republic helping to build houses and was struggling to adjust to life back at home. With a new outlook on the world and her place in it she was feeling like her new way of seeing things was not shared by many people—until she found Global Citizen Corps.

After she joined he attended a leadership summit. For Casey the clear highlight of the summit was a two-hour video conference with like minded GCC leaders from Iraq. There she was in the middle of a large group of American kids, chatting and discussing serious issues with kids from Iraq! The Iraqi students sang traditional Kurdish songs and Casey and the other American kids sang “Don’t Stop Believing”—you know: “Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world. She took the midnight train going anywhere!”

After the Global Citizen Corps Summit and the video conference Casey knew that she was not alone in his desire to see real change in the world. There are plenty of people with the same hopes and dreams—they just have to be found. And Global Citizen Corp is a great place to find them.

World AIDS Day

By the end of the day AIDS was completely erased— at least in halls of Wilson High School. Global Citizen Corp Leaders there organized activities for World Aids Day on December 1st. The day is set aside for the world to focus on the continuing spread of the AIDS pandemic and to raise awareness on how to prevent it. To educate their peers GCC leaders wore red and encouraged their classmates to do the same in a display of solidarity with those afflicted. They put up posters around the school with facts and statistics and had a table set up in the hall where they passed out pins, ribbons and informational booklets. On the wall they had a banner that spelled out AIDS with condoms that were meant to be pulled off as a reminder of the simple things that can be done to prevent AIDS. By the end of the day the banner was blank, the table and posters were gone— any trace of AIDS had symbolically disappeared.