Vivent Health and National AIDS Memorial Recent Partnership is Bringing a Remembrance Quilt to Wisconsin to Honor those Who Lost to AIDS
A portion of the AIDS Quilt Milwaukee HIV Medical Home at 820 North Plankinton Avenue. (Picture provided by Vivent Health)
Vivent Health, a nationally recognized leader in the fight against HIV/AIDS, announced on June 23, 2020, their partnership with the National AIDS Memorial, a nonprofit devoted to the remembrance of people lost to AIDS. Vivent Health will provide a monetary gift over five years to support AIDS Memorial Quilt programs and educational activities.
Included in this support is displaying the AIDS Quilt—50,000 3-by 6-foot memorial panels, individually sewn together to tell the personal stories of 105,000 lives lost to AIDS—across the country, including in Milwaukee.
Through their partnership, ten sections of the AIDS Quilt, consisting of 80 individual panels, will be on display at Vivent Health offices in six cities in Wisconsin, Colorado, Missouri and Texas. Each panel will represent the geographic area that it will reside in and it will be rotated within Vivent’s locations throughout the year.
The AIDS Quilt will be an educational tool for employees and community members about HIV/AIDS.
“We hope that it will allow people to reflect on their own lives and the impact of HIV,” said CEO of Vivent Health Mike Gifford.
The AIDS Quilt was created by San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones after he learned that more than 1,000 San Franciscans had died from AIDS-related complications. At the same time, he was planning an annual candlelight march to honor men like San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. During the march, Jones asked each of the marchers to write the names of friends and loved ones who had died on placards. At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders taping these placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. Those postcards have now transitioned into the creation of the AIDS Quilt.
“Today, the Quilt remains a powerful social justice teaching tool that represents so many lives lost to HIV/AIDS,” said National AIDS Memorial Executive Director John Cunningham. “With the support from partners like Vivent Health, we are able to ensure that the lives and stories the Quilt represents can be shared in communities across the country.”
Currently, there are more than 1.1 million people living with HIV in the United States, with an estimated 1 in 7 people not knowing that they have it, according to a press release. The partnership between Vivent Health and National AIDS Memorial will work together to raise awareness and reach communities and populations who are heavily impacted by HIV, which includes Black, gay men, who are the most impacted.
For Gifford, it’s more than just a Quilt, it’s about addressing the inequalities of our societies, such as hate against the LGBTQ+ community, racism, sexism and more.
He wants others to “see people as people.”
“We are honored to join forces and expand education and awareness about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in pursuit of our vision of a world without AIDS,” Gifford said.
For more information on Vivent Health, click here. For more information on National AIDS Memorial, click here.