AIDS Walk is a walkathon fundraiser that raises money to combat the AIDS epidemic. The funds raised from AIDS Walks usually benefit a local AIDS service organization (such as Gay Men's Health Crisis, Whitman-Walker Clinic or the AIDS Project Los Angeles), which provide services and advocacy for local community residents who are infected with HIV. They are also often credited for being effective tools of public outreach, community empowerment, and education for the issues surrounding AIDS.
AIDS Walk fundraisers are a primarily American phenomenon because the United States has no nationalized healthcare system, and the services provided by local AIDS service organizations may not be otherwise accessible to people who are HIV positive.
Famous quotes containing the words aids and/or walk:
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)
“the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:”
—Archie Randolph Ammons (b. 1926)