Advocates raise AIDS awareness on Temple campus ahead of annual AIDS Walk

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Ahead of the annual AIDS Walk Philly next month, AIDS Fund organizers gathered on Temple University’s main campus to encourage students to sign up and participate in the major fundraising event.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports, the adolescent and young adult population (ages 13-24) accounted for 20% of new HIV infections in 2022. 

“We want to always make sure we’re reaching out to young people and make sure they understand the seriousness of HIV, the history.” said Robb Reichard, the executive director of AIDS Fund. “And we’re here to kind of kick off [the AIDS Walk], hoping that we’ll get some students to register to come out and walk and fundraise for the event.”

The AIDS Fund team also displayed a walk-through timeline to educate and inform students passing by. The timeline features a series of 4-foot tall boards — marking key moments in HIV/AIDS history from 1981 to the present.

“In many ways, I feel like we are back at the beginning — we’re fighting to get people’s attention,” Reichard said. “People now are becoming complacent because we do have these wonderful treatments, we do have these advancements in prevention methods and so, it’s becoming an invisible epidemic again. And that really concerns me.”

Despite the advancements in preventing and treating HIV, the housing crisis has made access to life-changing care more difficult for those living with the virus.

According to the CDC, people experiencing housing instability are more likely to delay HIV care, while also having reduced access to consistent treatment. Proper treatment for HIV suppresses the virus to undetectable levels, but when HIV positive individuals do not receive care or stall care, the infection can become transmissible once again.

Advocates say the percentage of unhoused people living with HIV nearly doubled in Philadelphia between 2020 and 2021.

“And when we talk about housing, it’s not only people who are homeless or experienced homelessness or unhoused,” says Evelyn Torres, the executive director of Action Wellness (previously Action Aids). “It’s also people who can’t afford their rent, right? People who are couch surfing. People who are in transitional housing or moving because they can’t afford their rent.”

It’s why advocates say funding people’s housing needs is front and center in their efforts.

“I think we’re at a very exciting time in terms of HIV. We can get to zero, we can end an epidemic,” Torres said. “But, we have to have the public involved and donating to the AIDS Fund, to Action Wellness, going to the walk because in order to end an epidemic we’ve got to look at those other critical issues that our clients face every day, which is unstable housing, food insecurity, those things have to be tackled before we can end an epidemic.”

Action Wellness partners with AIDS Fund for their annual AIDS Walk on Oct. 20. Donations help these organizations with their continued advocacy and service work for positive and at-risk HIV/AIDS populations.

Celia Bernhardt contributed reporting to this story.