So the annual Student Stop AIDS Campaign Tour has come to an end after 5 weeks of travelling across the length and breadth of the country! And it was a HUGE SUCCESS!!
We visited 18 universities from Dundee down to Sussex, where our two speakers Mo and Lea spoke to 815 people and we also let them know about why HIV treatment is so important, the Medicines Patent Pool, our new and exciting competition with RESULTS UK and how they can get involved in the campaign.
We visited the House of Commons and DFID – Pamela Nash MP hosted our event in parliament and in total we had 8 MPs at events during the 4 weeks. At DFID our event was hosted by Michael Anderson (Director General for Policy and Global Issues) which enticed many civil servants including Simon Bland, Head of Global Funding to the event. We promoted the new evidence surrounding treatment as prevention and the role the investment framework could play in seeing the reversal and ultimate ending of the pandemic.
This year we also carried out a tonne of campaigning activities in the daytimes as well which turned out to be a fantastic addition to the tour. In total we held 14 pool parties and collected 8034 actions cards pressuring Johnson & Johnson to join negotiations with the patent pool, in cities across the UK as well as outside “The Baby Show” at Earls Court… with an abundance of mothers around!
Check out our photos from the tour here
There were several local media and student articles surrounding the tour including these online from Dundee, Sheffield, and Leeds (page 5). You can read about the student experience in this blog from one of our Edinburgh Stop AIDers. One key thing we have learnt is that October is not really bikini weather.
All in all a hugely successful tour – thanks to those of you who came!!
Check out our new Student Stop AIDS Campaign action video here!