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Raising awareness about HIV and AIDS is probably the most important thing we can do to take action against the crisis. People need to feel comfortable asking questions about it and they need to get answers. The more people know about HIV/AIDS, the more they can do to help prevent the spread of it. Educate others and encourage them to share what they learn with people they know. Knowledge is power!
Understand what HIV and AIDS are- know the difference! This way, you can try to help other people understand the disease and maybe even answer questions they have about it. You’ll feel more confident, too, starting the campaign off with a little bit of background knowledge. Check out Do Something’s HIV/AIDS fact sheets for more information: The Difference Between HIV and AIDS, FAQs about HIV/AIDS, and Introduction to HIV/AIDS Treatments will provide you with the basics.
Make a fact sheet (you can use our facts if you want) and get permission to make a bunch of copies and post them throughout your school. Hallways, bathroom doors, and community posting boards are great places to start.
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Want to find out what people know? Create a quiz and administer it during lunch or in between classes. You can create it using facts from our fact page ((link)), or by using some of the questions on this ((link)) quiz here from PBS. Make it short but sweet: about 10 questions is a good length. Don’t let it stop at the students- get teachers and administration to take the quiz as well! Start off by going to statehealthfacts.org to get stats for your state. People are more interested in learning how HIV/AIDS affects them in their community. Make the quiz anonymous, but ask them their grade and gender- it might be interesting to see later on the differences between classes and genders. Once you’ve created your quiz, ask a teacher if they’d be willing to help you out by making copies of the quiz. Then get a couple of your friends to help you hand out the quiz. Make sure the students complete it there (and not take it away with promises of bringing it back). You can try luring them to your table with pieces of red candy or red ribbons. The most time consuming part of this project is tabulating the results. This means going through each quiz one by one and marking down the responses. It might help to make a mini spreadsheet for each of the questions and give tallies for each response. Then, when you’re done going through each of the quizzes you can make final counts. Then, analyze the answers people gave you: do they know more or less than you thought they would know? Are there certain questions people did really well on or really poorly on? Do males or females seem to be more knowledgeable on HIV/AIDS, or is it about equal? Now it’s time to report. Make posters with the results, or take some time in the morning to announce them over the loudspeaker. Create a print-out and post it in classrooms, bathrooms, and hallways to show people in your school just how much they know (or don’t know). E-mail your results to all of the teachers and ask them to announce them to their classes. Get the word out! If your school constituency is really lacking in knowledge about HIV/AIDS, provide them with the facts so they can start to know. The truth is that HIV and AIDS is a national and global epidemic and it is important that everyone is aware of its’ reach. For a little more help, check out our page on creating a survey about an important issue. |
Host a movie night (or afternoon if it’s during school hours) and show a documentary about HIV/AIDS. Need ideas? Read our guide on hosting a HIV/AIDS awareness movie night.
Create unity: Have everyone in your school rally around the cause. World Aids Day is officially December 1, but you can center your efforts around any day to raise awareness. Get everyone to wear a red ribbon, or the color red, on a specific day. Have every classroom create a poster or flyer to put up around the school with facts and statistics on HIV and AIDS. Look at our World AIDS Day guide for more tips on how to get involved.
Give them the resources: Hopefully, once people are more aware of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, they will want to know what they can do to get involved. Encourage them to continue spreading the word in their own community and to their family members and friends. Take it a step beyond raising awareness, and hold a fundraising campaign to donate money to a HIV/AIDS organization. Find a local HIV/AIDS organization and volunteer your time and efforts.
Stigma and discrimination: Together, the stigma and discrimination associated with HIV/AIDS constitutes one of the greatest barriers to dealing with the epidemic. People are sometimes hesitant to go and find out their HIV status because of the association with behaviors that may be considered socially unacceptable by many people. Those who know they are infected are sometimes uncomfortable sharing their diagnosis and do not take action to prevent others or seek treatment and care for themselves. Joining in the fight against the discrimination of people infected with HIV or AIDS will show support and will hopefully help in tackling the stigma associated with it.