"AIDS Policy Project is one of the most exciting, enterprising, worthwhile groups around." --GMHC and ACT UP founder Larry Kramer, 2010
Experienced AIDS advocates, political strategists, health professionals, and people with AIDS have launched a campaign for a cure for the 33 million people living with HIV. Join us! info@aidspolicyproject.org or make a contribution at www.AIDSPolicyProject.org
Address:
5120 Walton Ave.
Philadelphia, PA 19143
Telephone:
215-939-7852
- To reintroduce the idea of a cure for AIDS, and advocate for HIV eradication research.
- To secure funding to treat people with AIDS through PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.
- To demand visible leadership on AIDS from our allies in
Congress.
- To do fresh, high-profile press work that reframes AIDS funding issues for the American public.
- To
convene meetings and provide other opportunities where researchers,
advocates, foundation staff members and others can share information,
brainstorm, collaborate, and borrow ideas for their work.
- We are recruiting. For more information, contact info@aidspolicyproject.org
Jeff Sheehy is director for communications at the AIDS Research Institute at UCSF. He is also a patient advocate and board member of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, California’s $3 billion public agency focused on stem cell research.
He is a longtime HIV/AIDS and gay civil rights activist and a person living with HIV. Sheehy worked on Survive AIDS’ project advocating for organ transplants for people with HIV. Survive
AIDS, in collaboration with Assemblywoman (now Senator) Carole Migden, obtained funds for
organ transplants for people with HIV. This initiative has not only saved lives of Californians with HIV/AIDS who needed transplants, but also led to a NIH funded protocol that is performing solid organ transplants in people with HIV at sites across the country.
In 1996, he and two colleagues conceived, drafted and lobbied through San Francisco’s historic Equal Benefits Ordinance, which requires that companies contracting with the City provide the domestic partners of employees the same benefits that spouses of employees receive. To support the legislation, he founded and led Equal Benefits Advocates, which conducted the successful national boycott of United Airlines that resulted in United, American, and US Airways offering domestic partner benefits to their employees worldwide in 1999. To date, over 3,500 companies have19 complied with the law. And, an estimated 50,000+ lesbians and gay men around the country havenow obtained health insurance and other benefits for their domestic partners due to this law.
From 1998 to 2000, Sheehy served as a victim advocate for the San Francisco District Attorney. In that position, he assisted same-sex victims of domestic violence and hate crimes and conducted an advanced officer training class in same-sex domestic violence at the San Francisco Police Academy.
Sheehy was appointed HIV/AIDS advisor to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004.
Sheehy has been the recipient of the Cape Crusader Award from Equality California, the HRC
Leadership Award from The Human Rights Campaign, the Tomas Fabregas AIDS Hero Award
presented at San Francisco’s AIDS Candlelight March in 2001 and was featured in OUT
Magazine’s OUT 100 list of the most influential members of the LGBT community in 1999. He
received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Texas in Austin.
Jose Demarco is a longstanding member of the AIDS Policy Project, Health GAP, ACT UP Philadelphia and founded Proyecto SOL (a Latino AIDS Leadership Organization), which advocates for services for the Latino community in Philadelphia and elsewhere. He is living with HIVAIDS. He co-founded the AIDS Policy Project’s cure project in November, 2009.
John S. James is editor of the pioneering AIDS treatment newsletter AIDS Treatment News.
Stephen LeBlanc, Esq. is an intellectual property attorney and AIDS advocate based in Oakland, Calfornia.
Richard A. Loftus, MD, is an internist and assistant director at the Palm Springs, office of the Eisenhower Medical Center. A cum laude graduate of Yale College, he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Herald. After college, his work as an AIDS activist with the group ACT UP (noted in Jon Cohen’s Shot in the Dark) led him to clinical research and then medical school. At the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, he worked in Dr. Mike McCune’s lab on the first study showing thymus function in HIV-positive persons, and with Dr. Steven Deeks on the SCOPE cohort, which produced the first study of HIV treatment failures in the HAART era.
Upon graduation from UCSF school of Medicine in 2001, he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha (medical honor society) and won the Gold-Headed Cane, the school’s highest honor. That year he also won the UCSF Chancellor’s Award for GLBT Leadership.
He completed his residency in primary care medicine at UCSF, where he won both the Intern (2002) and Resident of the Year (2003) awards. In 2004 the students of UCSF School of Medicine recognized his devotion to medical education with a TEACH award, and UCSF Medical Center acknowledged his dedication to patient care with its Exceptional Physician award. He completed a fellowship in HIV Clinical Care at San Francisco General Hospital in 2005. His community service includes work with Nexus Health Collective, a gay men's advocacy and service group he founded with another UCSF medical student in 2001.
Rick is a former board member of the Treatment Action Group of New York. In 2005, Nexus ran an all-volunteer program giving out free hepatitis vaccinations at bars and street fairs in San Francisco. His survival guide for med students, The Nerd's Guide to Pre-Rounding, was released by Cambridge University Press in June 2006.
Dr. Loftus is one of only three graduates of San Francisco General Hospital HIV Fellowship.
Joe Wright, MD is a Harvard-trained physician based in Boston. He spent most of the 1990s doing HIV prevention work in San Francisco, including community organizing for safe sex and community education for an HIV vaccine research group. He first learned immunology in ACT UP Golden Gate's Immune Based Therapy Breakfast Club meetings; he later worked in Polly Matzinger's immunology lab at the NIH, and went to Harvard Medical School, where he co-founded a student AIDS action group and spent two months in 2003 as a volunteer for South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign. Joe's medical school thesis, which he is working on turning into a book, was about the early history of AIDS activism. During medical school, he was a frequent commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His residency training has put special focus on primary care and HIV care and he plans a career as a primary care physician focused on working with people living with HIV/AIDS.
Diane Cenko began her career as an AIDS advocate by collecting the oral accounts of people with AIDS receiving care at the Kaiser Permanente-Oakland HMO as part of ACT UP Golden Gate’s successful campaign to improve medical care for thousands of HIV-positive patients treated at Kaiser. Diane later worked on the Project Inform Treatment Hotline and eventually became a board member there. She currently edits HIVCare News, now part of BETA (The Bulletin of Experimental Treatments for AIDS), published by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. HIVCare News is a clinical trials newsletter for HIV physicians and AIDS organizations in the Bay Area. Diane lives in Oakland, California.
Katie Krauss—Executive Director and Founder
Katie has been a political strategist, public policy advocate, and organizer since the late 1980s. As a member of ACT UP Golden Gate, she organized a diverse, statewide coalition that succeeded in doubling the budget of California's AIDS Drug Assistance Program, tripling the list of drugs available, and restructuring California's AIDS funding priorities. She initiated and helped lead the first US health advocacy campaign against an HMO, Kaiser Permanente, which was providing substandard treatment for thousands of people with AIDS in the Bay Area. As a result of the campaign, Kaiser adopted critical reforms (including all of the advocates’ demands) and is now a national AIDS “Center of Excellence.” Katie also advocated for AIDS treatments, and belonged to the Immune-based Therapies Breakfast Club and the AIDS vaccines working group.
Katie was one of the first US activists to publicly advocate for AIDS treatment for people with AIDS in developing countries and was a key strategist who helped launch the global AIDS treatment campaign in the late 1990s, working as a member of Health GAP and with the Treatment Action Campaign of South Africa. This campaign, in turn, created political momentum to support the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria and the President’s Emergency Fund to Fight AIDS (PEPFAR).
In 2002, she lead a successful international campaign to free Dr. Wan Yanhai, a pioneering Chinese AIDS advocate, from government detention, a campaign covered in a front-page article in the New York Times. She has continued to advocate for science-based policies and treatment for people with AIDS, in solidarity with Chinese AIDS advocates and public health experts.
She works closely with AIDS activists in China and Africa and has built a diverse and powerful coalition of western advocacy groups interested in AIDS in China. Her advocacy and organizing against AIDS in China was influential in securing some $90 million in aid for China's AIDS programs and instrumental in the release of two dozen Chinese activists detained by the authorities for their work since 2002, including China's most prominent AIDS activists.
Katie is also a media strategist who has placed articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many other US and international outlets. She has placed four front-page New York Times stories during her career, and numerous editorials and other articles. She has been interviewed on CNN, NPR, for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, etc. Her opinion pieces have been published in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the International Herald Tribune.
She has worked on many other AIDS issues including Medicaid, clinical trial ethics, drug development advocacy, trade and patent issues, Africa's health worker shortage, financing for the Global Fund, and PEPFAR reauthorization.
She helped organize Congressional hearings on harm reduction and women’s health, and helped organize an influential meeting at the United Nations on the health worker shortage in Africa in 2008.
Katie co-founded the AIDS Policy Project’s cure campaign with Jose Demarco in November, 2009. She co-authored the group’s first report, AIDS Cure Research for Everyone, with John S. James and Stephen Leblanc.
Laurie Wen is a member of ACT UP New York and a filmmaker who has worked extensively on AIDS issues, including AIDS in China. She coordinated extensive and successful Chinese language broadcast and newspaper coverage as part of the campaign to free jailed Chinese AIDS activist Dr. Wan Yanhai. She is a former community organizer for the FXB Foundation (Dr. Jim Kim’s organization in Boston) and worked to advance single-payer health insurance as part of US health reform. Laurie is active working on issues affecting health and social justice and is currently an organizer with Hunger Action Network. Among other activists, she is probably the most popular AIDS activist working in the United States. She lives in New York City.
