Competing Causes: PSLM Sit-In Takes Attention From AIDS Week

It's difficult to stroll through the Yard these days without feeling the tug of socially just causes mixed in with the spring weather.

Last week, in between the raucous first days of the Massachusetts Hall occupation and after Take Back the Night's T-shirt clothesline testimonial to victims of domestic violence, a coalition of public service groups hosted the first of what they plan to make an annual Harvard AIDS Week series of events to raise money and awareness for the African AIDS epidemic.

During the week of April 14th to the 21st, students launched a letter-writing campaign, held a benefit concert, hosted a reading by Jamaica Kincaid and a panel discussion, concluding the week with a day-long fast and fast-breaking benefit dinner on Friday. The week raised money for the AIDS Orphans Education Trust, a charity organization for AIDS orphans.

"We originally wanted to do a dance marathon to raise money for a cause and we picked African AIDS," says Lauren E. Bonner `04, member of Har'd CORPS, a public service group. "We wanted and we needed a cause that would touch the global community. We thought it was a really important cause."

Benjamin M. Wikler `03 expanded the idea beyond the original single event. In between the initial Har'd CORPS meeting to plan an AIDS benefit concert and the first meeting of many student groups interested in AIDS Week, Wikler helped put together the Harvard AIDS Coalition to continue AIDS awareness on campus beyond the middle of April and make it into a permanent project on campus.

Bonner explains that through a lucky coincidence BASIC-Boston Area Students Involved in the Community-was planning a benefit dance a week later than Har'd CORPS's ideal benefit concert date. BASIC had the event idea and no cause yet, and the issue of AIDS in southern Africa came to anchor the two benefits into a week of AIDS awareness events.

"It started out with this benefit concert idea and the idea to help a specific cause. It really just took off. It was almost out of control," Bonner says. "It definitely started out over dinner saying hey-what charity should we do?"

"It was sort of like striking while the iron was hot," says Stephen N. Smith `02, the founder and director of Har'd CORPS, of the enthusiasm he was able to generate for AIDS Week. "We wanted to do something that was timely and where any amount of money could really go a long way. This was unique because it was an issue around which a lot of people were wanting to get involved."

With energy for the event building, Smith brought together more than 30 other student groups he thought would be interested in helping, including the Harvard African Students Association, Bhumi, the Black Students Association, the Catholic Students Association and others.

"Steve sent out e-mails like crazy. That's probably something Steve does better than anybody else on campus. He pulled together about 30 people," says Bonner.

The eventual core of the group that Smith brought together worked from early February to plan the mid-April week of events. They knew they would be up against Take Back the Night, but they didn't expect the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM), which started its sit-in during the middle of AIDS Week last Wednesday, to steal the spotlight. However, Bonner and Leslie A. Garbarino `04, who organized the day-long fast for AIDS Week last Friday, say the sit-in did not upstage their events, however, but actually increased attendance.

"PSLM inspired a sense of activism on campus that was either suppressed or absent, It just sparked people," Bonner says.

"I think people saw our fliers at the PSLM rallies. Attendance at events after the sit-in started was phenomenal," says Garbarino.

Perhaps the greatest inconvenience was that Smith was accessible only by cell phone, as he joined the protesters inside the building.

"I was very upset that I had to miss the event. If it were up to me we wouldn't have gone into Mass. Hall for another couple of days. It was a really tough decision, but since spring term of freshman year I've been working on the Living Wage Campaign and it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience," Smith says.

But with the core group's planning, Smith says his absence was more of a nuisance for him-because he had to miss the week's events-than it was for anyone else.

"By the end of AIDS Week I could have flown out of the country and the people who were running it could have handled everything," he says.

And Bonner, who was among those left in charge, says everything went smoothly.

"It was remarkably low-stress. One of the greatest things about it was that at each event there was a different group of people," she says. "People didn't just walk away, they took something with them."

-Staff writer Rachel E. Dry can be reached at dry@fas.harvard.edu.