This year the social media campaign Voices for World AIDS Day remembers December 1, 1988, the first World AIDS Day. CANFAR had just been founded a year prior, and was already working on its mission of funding HIV research and increasing awareness.
CANFAR founders realized research was needed. How is the disease was transmitted? How does it act in the body?How do we begin treating the virus? They recognized there was a very large void to fill relating to all aspects of AIDS.
People were barely talking about AIDS in the public realm at this time, and HIV didn’t even exist as a diagnosis. AIDS was, for the most part, a death sentence 30 years ago.
Today, World AIDS Day celebrates community engagement across Canada. Its goals are collaboration, erasing stigma, and raising funds for services affecting people living with HIV.
On Dec. 1, the country united in solidarity to remember those we have lost to AIDS. Canadians joined together in support of the 75,500 individuals living with the HIV. The Voices for World AIDS Day’s social media campaign, in partnership with eight other Canadian AIDS Service Organizations, created over 517,000 online impressions.
