POZ - Meet Me in the Lobby: How AIDSWatch Took PWAs to Capitol Hill

April 27, 2007

by Lucile Scott

This past week in Washington, D.C., with the cherry blossoms in full bloom, about 300 HIV positive people converged on Capitol Hill demanding federal AIDS-care reform. But the posse wasn’t marching out front, waving picket signs. Indeed, they could have been mistaken for legislative staff as they strode, in business attire, among the palatial Congressional offices across from the Capitol building. Carrying binders and policy proposals, they scurried from office to office, catching meetings with Congressional Representatives, passing through hallways filled with civic-minded vacationers and a massive contingent of lobbying steelworkers.

The events marked the 14th annual AIDSWatch, organized and sponsored by the National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA) and the Treatment Access Expansion Project (TAEP). Each year positive people from across the country head to D.C. for three days of lobbying, telling their personal tales to hammer home how seemingly abstract bills affect their lives and others’. “For people on the Hill programs become budgets and numbers,” says participant Jim Pickett, director of Public Policy at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, who was diagnosed in 1995. “But when people come into the office and tell their stories it resonates with the legislators, like it would with anyone.”

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