World AIDS Day 2007

In 2008, AIDS Survival Project will fulfill its missional goal to empower and improve the quality of life for Georgians living with HIV/AIDS in the midst of our Nation’s forty-fourth Presidential election.

The national public discourse will be increasingly dominated by ending war-beginning war, with global warming and threatening environmental deterioration, with concern and lack of concern for ever-widening circles of poverty, conflicts over private or public approaches to health care reform, with constitutionally controversial questions about religion and public service-public security, and with our failure to adequately educate the general population. Talk-about-AIDS must take its place among these dominating discourses because the continued spread of HIV/AIDS is directly associated with them. Our public response to war, to the environment, to poverty, to health care reform, to education, and to faith frames, and gives direction to, our public response to HIV/AIDS.

In response particularly to the visible and vocal attention health care reform and religious faith and practice are receiving in the national presidential election, together with the renewed emphasis theology and public policy are receiving in our Nation’s public discourse, AIDS Survival Project will host both a Call to Action and a Call to Worship to commemorate WORLD AIDS DAY 2007. The Honorable Kathy Ashe, a member of Georgia’s State House of Representatives, an elder and member of Atlanta’s Central Presbyterian Church, will serve as the Honorary Chair for these events. Representative Ashe is a mother, an active community leader, a former educator, and a volunteer. In June of 1991, she was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives and is currently the Representative for House District 56 in the heart of Atlanta.

This remarkable pairing of a Call to Action and a Call to Worship is an intentional act of public service and public faith, designed to reduce the demoralizing stigma associated with HIV/AIDS in Georgia, and designed to reduce the barriers Georgians encounter to receiving life-sustaining care and treatment for HIV/AIDS.

The Call to Action, “A Sustaining Presence, A Sustainable Platform,” will publicly introduce ASP’s statewide health advocacy agenda to be implemented in 2008, and the Call to Worship, “A Sustaining Presence, A Sustaining Promise,” will draw faith communities together in public worship, urging faith communities to continue to assist and support Georgians living with HIV/AIDS.