Can You Ignore It?:
| HIV/AIDS - Can You Afford to Ignore It? |
On February 14, 2001, the question was first asked at Ramapo College. In a meeting with a committee group that set out to plan our annual AIDS Awareness Week, we developed the question that launched this website. Can You Afford to Ignore It? With these few words, we changed the way we approached education, awareness raising, and advocacy for HIV/AIDS issues. With this one question, we challenged the apathy that so many times we hear regarding health issues.
The question was clear, simple, and complete complex. In its simplicity lies the complexities for the question challenges how each of us look at HI and our place in its pandemic map. Pushing through this idea, we developed programs that would equally ask simple questions that required complex, deeper answers. However, on April 2nd of that same year, a new muse presented a new idea. AIDS awareness is not simply one week of events and the recognition of one day in December, but an ongoing awareness of being safe when we are at our most vulnerable. It is about knowing what the real deal is with this disease and knowing enough to be safe and not have to sit in a waiting room waiting to see what a simple blood test will reveal. With the delay of a fundraising dance, we changed the theme of our awareness week into a full fledge campaign that would be in all our faces whenever we roam the halls of our campus.
"HIV: Can You Afford to Ignore It?" is a multimedia campaign that is going beyond anything that has ever been done at Ramapo. From posted ads on bulletin boards to commercials on our campus's media networks, the message will be heard, seen and read.
Our goal is to assure that members of our community will be better educated about HIV/AIDS and will become advocates in their own right by spreading the knowledge they gain. Our goal is to give a new perspective to HIV awareness and show how all of us can NOT afford to ignore it.
