UNIVERSITY COALITIONS for GLOBAL HEALTH

This past Tuesday, nearly 200,000 student activists took action for Youth AIDS Day 2008. During the UCGH national call in day students from across the country urged members of the House and Senator Lugar to reauthorize and reform the policies in the next iteration of the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Together we called on Congress to increase funding levels to $50 billion over the next 5 years, support the training and retention of 140,000 new health care professionals, remove the 1/3 abstinence until marriage earmark prevention funding earmark…and I have to say you were VERY successful!

As students were jamming Capitol Hill phone lines with hundreds of calls and clogging up email inboxes with PEPFAR demands, activists in D.C. were ramping for “mark up” in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA) and together we were able to get an excellent PEFPAR 2 bill passed through committee.

So I want to say a special thank you to all of those who took action for Youth AIDS Day. We generated over 1,206 emails from 346 Congressional Districts and made hundreds of calls to Senator Lugar’s office (who’s staff actually called one of the supporting organizations to ask why the students kept calling!-great work everyone!)

For those of you who maybe interested on Thursday, February 28 at 8pm ET and Friday, February 29 at 2pm ET, there will be a conference call to update student advocates on the current PEPFAR legislation and discuss what steps to take next. Please join us to learn how you can continue to take action to make sure this important piece of legislation passes. At the start time, call in to 800-505-4464 and type the passcode 951678# to join the call.

ps…check out PHR’s awesome blog write up about Youth AIDS Day

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under Events, HIV/AIDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.