Julie Davids

CHAMP

Julie Davids is a Rhode Island-based
organizer, research advocate and policy advocate. Currently, she is
Senior Consultant at the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP),
coordinating the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance and assisting with
the Prevention Research Advocacy Working Group. 

She also co-chairs the Federal AIDS
Policy Partnership (FAPP) and is an External Expert on the Strategic
Working Group (SWG) of the Division of AIDS at NIAID. 

She learned the ropes of AIDS activism
from the leaders of ACT UP Philadelphia in the first-wave HIV/AIDS direct
action protest movement. During that time, she worked on campaigns for
needle exchange, health care access, research issues, and the rights
of people of all genders. She served on the Community Constituency Group
(CCG) of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), where she sat on the
Perinatal Transmission Committee.  

She co-founded Project TEACH (Treatment
Education Activists Combating HIV), which provides activist and leadership
training for people living with HIV at Philadelphia FIGHT, and served
as the first community organizer for Health GAP, an activist group dedicated
to eliminating barriers to access to HIV/AIDS treatment around the world.

From Breakthroughs to Reality: The Health Care Link in High-Tech HIV Prevention

Julie Davids

Julie Davids is the Executive Director of CHAMP (Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project).

Twenty years ago, AIDS was burning through the country and decimating whole communities while Reagan fiddled away. ACT UP New York burst onto the scene with a rallying cry of "drugs into bodies," shutting down Wall Street over the price of AZT, the only treatment and the most expensive drug ever marketed.

The group grew into a powerful and innovative social force—with hundreds of independent chapters worldwide—and racked up hard-won victories from the accelerated approval of the drugs that turned around the epidemic in the U.S., to changing the very definition of AIDS, to include the conditions seen in women and injection drug users so they could access research and benefits, to the establishment of underground and legalized needle exchanges, to the vigilant defense of the civil and human rights of people living with HIV.

Structures of Injustice: Notes from the HIV Epidemic

Julie Davids

Julie Davids is the Executive Director of CHAMP (Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project).

Imagine that you live in a country where HIV infection rates are on the rise. In your nation's capital, one out of every 20 people is HIV positive. In some socially marginalized communities, nearly half of people are HIV positive.

In this place, about half of all people who need to be taking HIV medication to stay healthy are unable to access medication on an ongoing basis, and some have died while on waiting lists for drugs. Hundreds of thousands of HIV positive people pass through prisons and jails each year, and no effort is made to coordinate education, prevention or social services for them.

If you are reading this post from the United States, you live in that country. The epidemic in Washington, DC rivals that of some African nations; people in South Carolina and West Virginia have died on waiting list for AIDS drugs; and Black gay and bisexual men, at the intersection of the gay and Black epidemics that comprise the majority of cases in our nation, have rates of HIV that average 46% across urban centers.